MRU 

lit; iiiiJiii fi II ill 





Class J_ I 

Cop}7ightN°_ 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSE 









Copyright, 191 8 

BY 

GEORGE ILES 



Ube Ikntcfterbocfcer ©reB8, 1Rew Ifforft 

DEC -4 I9I8 
kl.A508383 



CO 
LIEUT.-COLONEL CASEY ALBERT WOOD, M.C., N.A. 

IN MEMORY OF OLD DAYS IN MONTREAL 



Two of the stories here presented are new. For 
permission to reprint the others I am indebted to the 
Gazette, the Herald, and the Standard, of Montreal. 

The address on Choosing Books is reprinted from 
the Hackley, published at Hackley School, Tarrytown, 
N. Y. 

Jottings from a Note-book have in part appeared 
in the Century Magazine, New York. 

G.I. 

2?3 Union Avenue, Montreal, 
June 20, iqi8. 



CONTENTS 








PAGE 


Who Killed John Burbank? i 


All but Wedded . 






22 


An III Wind 






• 32 


A Tell-Tale Palm 






39 


A Puzzling Case . 






5i 


Shadows Before . 






58 


Why Joel Jones Died Poor 






65 


Slight Repairs . 






73 


A Lifted Veil 






89 


Legible Lips 






96 


A Golden Silence 






103 


As Others See us 






109 


Almost a Tragedy 






128 



Choosing Books: An Address at Hackley 

School, Tarrytown, New York . .141 



Jottings from a Note-Book. 



167 



vu 



WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 

"I see no shadows," saith the sun: 
Yet he casts them every one. 

All the years that our family lived in Montreal, 
more than half my lifetime, the great church of 
Notre Dame seemed an irresistible magnet when- 
ever we chose a home. When one exigency or 
another, the need of more room, or escape from an 
intrusive factory, obliged us to find new quarters, 
we never went far; the new home, like the old, was 
sure to stand almost beneath the twin stark towers 
of Notre Dame, within sound of its oft-recur- 
ring chimes. To-day, as the traveler approaches 
Montreal from the river, the old Norman church 
still looms high in the landscape. Fifty years ago, 
before any lofty structure stood its neighbor, 
Notre Dame dominated the city as St. Peter's, at 
this hour, as with a scepter, lifts itself above 
Rome. 

Until the seventies there remained on a northerly 



2 WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 

corner of Place d'Armes, an old house which faced 
the portal of Notre Dame, or "La Paroisse," as 
her parishioners affectionately call the hospitable 
old church. This house had been built about the 
end of the eighteenth century by Duncan Leslie, 
a factor of the Hudson's Bay Company. Its 
cellars, stoutly vaulted, like those of the Chateau 
Ramesay, testified to days when Indian marauders 
might be dreaded. Besides, there was no such 
assurance against fire as a roof built of bonded 
stone as faithfully as a wall. Duncan Leslie 
lived to be ninety. At his death his house and 
the dwelling next door were united as a hotel, 
and here it was that in 1842 Charles Dickens 
was entertained when he visited Canada. A few 
years thereafter the landlord, too fond of his own 
good cheer, went into bankruptcy, and stayed there. 
Forthwith the premises on the ground floor were 
converted into shops, and the upper stories became 
lodgings. But neither the shops nor the lodgings 
were much in demand. People said that the site 
was betwixt and between. It was not quite 
within the business center of the city; it stood 
distinctly outside its residential quarter, even then 
moving slowly westward. Place d'Armes, the 
handsomest little square in Montreal, thus seemed 
to inflict loss upon surrounding landlords. But 
their low rents were to the advantage of many an 
ill-paid clerk in the nearby banks and insurance 



WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 3 

offices, and saved not a few dollars to needy stu- 
dents of law and medicine. 

In the spring of '67 my father died, and it 
became necessary for me to seek lodgings. One 
morning in April I chanced to pass the Leslie 
house; its doors displayed a sign, "Rooms to let." 
On inquiry from the caretaker, a withered dame 
from Terrebonne, I learned that the whole top- 
floor was vacant and that to an approved tenant 
its five rooms would be leased for ten dollars a 
month. But, in case the property were sold for 
demolition, I must remove at a month's notice. 
In accordance with these terms I signed a lease 
that week, and never have I lived in a house that 
I liked better. Each of my doors, beneath its 
white paint, had in legible outline an oval plate 
bearing a room number, to remind me that here, 
long ago, had been the inn that had sheltered 
Dickens. The corner room, after the lapse of 
quite seventy years, bore witness to the good taste 
and the full purse of Duncan Leslie. Its gilt 
frieze was still untarnished; its mantelpiece in 
carved gray marble was worthy of a modern 
mansion. One window looked forth upon the 
Square and the facade of Notre Dame; the other 
window commanded a prospect of Mount Royal, 
then in full view from that slight eminence. My 
bedroom, fronting on St. James Street, was the 
largest in the suite. Its big wall cupboard, rilled 



4 WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 

to overflowing with magazines, pamphlets, and 
papers, was the handiest bookcase imaginable, 
for its lower shelves were so wide that they formed 
a capital step-ladder. And every shelf enjoyed 
the full light of a broad, old-fashioned window 
that reached to the floor. Modern architects are 
skillful in new ways, but they have dropped some 
of the ingenuity and the cosiness of the best old 
houses. 

Why was I obliged to live in these down-town 
lodgings which, though comfortable enough, were 
certainly not as pleasant as quarters in Dorchester 
Street would have been, away from the smoke 
and dust of the city, amid quiet villas and well 
kept gardens? My father had been a linen-draper 
a few doors east of the church of Notre Dame. 
One of his intimate friends had been John Burbank, 
a leading importer of woolens whose business grew 
twice as fast as that of any rival. Long ago Mr. 
Burbank was one of the organizers of the Silver 
Islet Mining Company, and became its president. 
For three years the mine paid portly dividends, so 
that its shares rose to a premium. Thereupon 
Burbank advised his friends to buy all the Silver 
Islet stock they could, as its price was certain to 
mount higher and higher. My father took this 
advice and bought two hundred shares, investing 
nearly every penny of his savings. In the follow- 
ing September Burbank read at a shareholders' 



WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 5 

meeting, the superintendent's report that every 
vein in the mines had ceased to yield paying ore. 
It afterward came out that he had read from the 
foot of the report a date much later than that 
affixed at the mine. All summer long he had known 
the truth, had suppressed it, and through men of 
straw, who held shares on his behalf, had victim- 
ized intimate friends, including my father. Never 
did Silver Islet pay its unfortunate owners a six- 
pence thereafter. In that far-away venture dis- 
appeared what was meant for my little patrimony. 
And all without anybody being able to prove in a 
court of law the sharp practice and treachery of 
John Burbank. 

Two of his nephews, Andrew and Mark, sat on 
a bench next mine at Wilson's School in Cote 
Street. They were not bad fellows at all, so far 
as I could see. But they were expected to break 
out at any time into badness and falseness by 
most of us boys who, boy-like, were disposed to 
visit the sins of the guilty on the heads of the 
innocent. The chimney-cowl of Wilson's School, 
one night mischievously twisted into a note of 
interrogation, was plainly visible from my bed- 
room. It was in a class-room beneath that sooty 
chimney that I found the warmest friend of my 
life, Gerald Gray, whose family, in my school-days, 
had been our next-door neighbors. Gerald was 
a few months older than I, a good deal bigger, a 



6 WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 

much swifter and longer- winded runner than I. 
And what an eye he had for the heaviest-laden 
apple-boughs along the slopes of the "Mountain, " 
beyond the head of Durocher Street. Gerald's 
father, a cooper, was a man cast in a large mold, 
with a face rugged and somber in the extreme. 
When he looked cross he might at once have been 
a condemning judge and an instant executioner. 
I can see him now as he would stride through St. 
James Street — with bushy eyebrows, half rusty 
and half gray, beneath which shone his spectacles 
in round brass rims. I used to wonder if Gerald, 
in any long lapse of years, would ever grow up to 
be as big and grim as his father — a man, I feel sure, 
to whom no boy, however bold, ever told a fib. 

John Gray throve so well in his cooperage 
that he gathered, what we were then wont to 
deem, a goodly surplus from his income. This 
he invested in a block of buildings a mile 
beyond the Bonaventure Station of the Grand 
Trunk Road. As he built honestly, he did 
not build cheaply; his outlays came to more 
than he had counted upon, and by a considerable 
sum. Just then a wave of depression swept over 
Canada, and John Gray's block stood idle, with 
interest and taxes running on. At such a time 
assets shrink, but debts remain as before. Gray's 
creditors grew impatient, pressed their claims, 
and began suits at law. His heart failed him, he 



WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 7 

became morose and morbid; where, he asked, 
were his friends? One bitterly cold February- 
night one of his lathemen noticed him walking 
toward the river through McGill Street. He 
was never afterward seen alive. In April his 
body, with a stone clenched in his hand, was 
recovered from the St. Lawrence. I shall never 
forget the grief of poor Gerald at his father's 
funeral. He loudly upbraided himself for making 
light of his father's anxieties, instead of proffering 
him what little solace he could. Yet Gerald was 
a good son, obedient to a nod or a glance from 
his father. Why should he so keenly bewail little 
neglects, trivial differences, that perchance never 
lay so long as an hour in his father's memory? 
Gerald, furthermore, had a sharp word for the 
men who had been his father's friends in pros- 
perity, only to turn the cold shoulder in his day 
of trouble. Then and always, faithfulness in 
friendship had the force of religion with Gerald 
Gray. Twice, when I was seriously ill, he nursed 
me with a patience that he never showed at any 
other time. 

John Gray's property, under his widow's 
shrewd management, turned out well. In two 
years all his creditors were paid in full. Every 
shop and dwelling in the Gray block had its ten- 
ant, and at rents nearly double what John Gray 
had been willing to take. But this prosperity, 



8 WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 

increasing year by year, brought no sunshine 
to Gerald. As he passed from youth to manhood 
he underwent an unhappy change. At school 
he had been cheery, and fonder than most of us 
of football, lacrosse, and skating. Now he had 
become moody, and had given up sport so com- 
pletely that, one by one, his companions were 
chilled off, and left Gerald to frown by himself. 
I remained the only friend he held by. And as I 
saw less and less of him as time went on, I feared 
that at last he would break with me as he had 
broken with all his other chums. One day, as he 
was walking homeward, I overtook him, and he 
revealed the cause of his habitual dejection. 
He was haunted day and night by his father's 
fate. Said he, "Every one tells me I'm like father 
in walk and talk and look." Then he touched his 
forehead and added, "I'm like him up here, too." 
That year, 1869, the Red River insurrection, 
headed by Louis Riel, a Montreal boy, broke 
out in the Northwest. Throughout Eastern 
Canada there was an enthusiastic enlistment of 
volunteers for service at Fort Garry, and the 
surrounding district. Gerald at once enrolled 
himself, and in less than a week was on his way 
westward. His mother was sorely distressed, 
but I hoped that new scenes and excitements 
would sweep the cobwebs from Gerald's brain. 
As a soldier he acquitted himself with credit; 



WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 9 

he was resourceful and brave in every emergency ; 
within six months he was gazetted a captain in 
the Twelfth Fusiliers. With his share from his 
father's estate he bought a few acres near what is 
now the heart of Winnipeg. There, when peace 
succeeded rebellion, he made his home in a lit- 
tle wooden shack, and lived the life of a recluse. 
Ever and anon he came to Montreal on business; 
always, I regretted to note, with increased mor- 
bidness of mind. His mother in the meantime 
had died, leaving him all her possessions, so that 
it was not pecuniary anxiety, as in his father's 
case, that weighed on Gerald's mind. He de- 
veloped, too, a keen eye for sound investments, so 
that it was clear that he could be rich if he chose. 
My quarters in Place d'Armes exceeded my 
needs, so I gave Gerald a room facing the square, 
to be his whenever he came to town. He furnished 
this room neatly, and every winter, usually in 
January, he would drop in, hang up his mink cap 
and mittens, his buffalo coat and broad moccas- 
sins, as if he had never lived anywhere else. He 
thoroughly liked the old place, with its freedom, 
comfort, and privacy. Around the corner was 
one of the best restaurants in Canada. But, 
truth to tell, year by year, Gerald's visits became 
painful to me. For hours together he would sit 
silently brooding, with his elbows upon his knees, 
as if bearing burdens wholly beyond escape. 



io WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 

Strange to say, his bodily health continued to be 
fairly good; his cheeks retained much of their 
boyish ruddiness. I felt certain that if he would 
but take abundant exercise, as of yore, he would 
keep the blue devils at bay. For a long time he 
allowed the dust to gather on a pair of dumb-bells 
that, as a young man, he had swung morning and 
night. One afternoon I came upon him rapidly 
pacing our hallway with these dumb-bells firmly 
clutched in his palms. I recalled with a heart 
throb that thus had his father grasped the stone 
which had borne him to the depths of the frozen 
St. Lawrence. It dawned upon me that here, 
after all, strode the son of John Gray destined, in 
all likelihood, to repeat the dread doom of his 
father. 

At intervals, ever growing farther apart, the 
clouds would lift from Gerald's brow, and he 
would return to the blitheness that had marked 
him as a boy. One night, when he seemed thus 
care-free, we walked to the river to watch some 
young skaters as they swirled on a rink near 
the Custom House. As we trudged through St. 
Jude Street, we passed the warehouse of Burbank 
& Company. There at his desk, close to a window, 
sat old Burbank himself, the founder of the firm, 
and still the active manager of its vast business. 
He chanced to look up as we went by, and I was 
struck by the malevolence of his face. His visage 



WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? u 

at best was what the Scotch call "dour, " and now, 
in advanced age, its angles of avarice had hardened 
into a wolfish ferocity. For many a long year 
his character had been sculpturing his features; 
that night his traits stood out plainly enough to 
be read by a child. It was fortunate, I thought, 
for Burbank & Company that most of their 
customers lived so far from Montreal that they 
had never seen the head of the house. I said to 
Gerald, "That's Burbank, who robbed my father 
in the Silver Islet scheme, long ago." Gerald 
had often heard the story; with a hiss of hatred, 
he whispered, "So that's the old scoundrel who 
betrayed and plundered his friends. I've heard 
of him all my life and never saw him till now. 
Many a better chap in the Red River Country has 
been shot in his tracks for stealing a horse, or a few 
peltries; but in this town a man may steal a 
fortune and go scot free." 

As he strode beneath the flickering gas-lamp 
on the corner of St. Paul Street, I glanced at 
Gerald's face. It bore an expression simply 
murderous, and I wondered why. He really 
hated Burbank worse than I did, whose father 
had been victimized by the treacherous scamp. 
But then Gerald deemed peculiarly sacred the 
ties of trust, and of friendship, which Burbank 
had craftily foresworn. I knew by experience 
the depth and warmth of Gerald's heart. Which 



12 WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 

meant that in hatred, as in affection, his feelings 
were vivid and profound. 

In a few minutes we were at the rink, where I 
joined at once in the sport. But the sight of 
Burbank had thrown Gerald into one of his worst 
fits of gloom. "No, thanks," he said again and 
again, as I offered him a pair of skates, and invited 
him to the ice. This was a sorry ending to a night 
so pleasantly begun. A little past nine o'clock 
we were once more at home. After an hour over 
the evening papers we went to bed. In less than 
a week, with more than his wonted abruptness, 
Gerald packed his portmanteau and took a west- 
ward train. I never saw him afterward. He 
left in the midst of a raging snowstorm, deaf to 
my entreaty that he should wait a day or two, and 
avoid a blockade on the road. 

About a year later I was summoned to Liverpool 
on an urgent errand. My business dispatched, 
I took a steamer for Halifax, and duly found 
myself once more in Place d'Armes. A brisk 
blaze whistled in my grate as I drew up to my 
table, to glance at the Gazettes which Madame 
Larue, my janitress, had heaped together for my 
perusal. I had not gone far when I was startled 
by a headline, " John Burbank, of St. Jude Street, 
slain there in cold blood." My first impulse was 
not one either of sympathy or regret. I was 
likely to be a poor man all my life through the 



WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 13 

dishonesty of the murdered millionaire : why then 
should I mourn him ? I read piecemeal the details 
of the tragedy. They still linger in the remem- 
brance of old Montrealers. Burbank, rich as he 
was, had remained a bachelor, and he was never 
really at home except in his frowsy office. Thither 
he would return after his frugal supper, even in 
winter, when business was comparatively dull. 
He liked to sit at his desk, alone in his huge ware- 
house, and review the transactions of the day in 
his sales-book and cash-book. No doubt a goodly 
part of his success was thought out here, in hours 
free from interruption, when St. Jude Street was 
as quiet as a country lane. Here, on the fatal 
night, he had been observed as late as ten o'clock. 
So testified two messengers from the telegraph 
office nearby, and an ancient man who stoked 
furnaces at the Allan Line Office on the wharfside. 
Nothing more was in evidence until seven o'clock 
next morning, when the storeman observed a 
pane smashed in the office window. Entering 
the room he found John Burbank's corpse prone 
on his desk, his skull fractured, and a frozen pool 
of blood at his feet. It was certain that the 
assassin had fired from the street at his victim. 
His shot, late at night, perchance early in the 
morning, had rung out unheard save by the 
slayer and the slain. 
.Eagerly I followed up in my file of Gazettes, 



14 WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 

the paragraphs regarding this dreadful crime. 
At the end of my reading, as at the beginning, the 
mystery stood unfathomed. There was not so 
much as a suspicion as to who the culprit was. 
Neither of Burbank's nephews, no other partner 
in the firm, none of his employees, no acquaint- 
ance, could recall any quarrel that might have 
provoked this foul murder. Burbank, indeed, 
was not a man given to quarrels. He was of a 
silent and reserved cast of mind. He had, to be 
sure, a large fund of ill-will, but it never rose to 
anger; he left people alone, and people left him 
alone. Whatever else he was, nobody could call 
him overbearing. His murderer could not have 
been a thief, for he had not crossed the threshold 
of the building. Its counters were bent with 
burdens of Yorkshire broadcloths; these were 
untouched. So were the contents of the safe: its 
cash-box and stamp-drawer would have offered 
tempting plunder to a burglar, for the safe-door 
stood ajar. 

This terrible murder, insoluble to detectives of 
renown no less than to ordinary folk, supplied 
the public with a theme for comment and mar- 
vel for months. Burbank & Company offered a 
thousand dollars for information that would reveal 
the slayer. This alluring offer was emblazoned 
on every fence on the Island of Montreal. It was 
printed in big type in scores of newspapers all the 



WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 15 

way from Halifax to Victoria. All in vain. And 
now around many a quiet hearthstone there was 
an unsparing return to the early record of John 
Burbank. Over and over again were recounted 
his frauds in the Silver Islet shares. Still older 
heads recalled the failure of the Champlain Bank, 
of which Burbank had been a director also. At 
the very outset of his career his ability had been 
so marked that, when barely twenty-one, he had 
been elected to the Champlain board, and soon 
became one of its most influential members. 
But the bank failed, and it was disclosed that a 
large, unsecured loan, involving utter loss, had 
been granted a firm in which Burbank was be- 
lieved to be a silent partner. This partnership 
could not be proved, but there were solid grounds 
for being certain of its existence. It was on 
Burbank's urgent and persistent solicitation that 
this disastrous loan had been granted. Sad tales 
were told of the misery due to the failure of 
the Champlain Bank. For years afterward, old 
men said, its directors, and especially John Bur- 
bank, were pointed at with curses uttered or re- 
pressed. And yet in all this tide of gossip and 
detraction nothing recent in the career of John 
Burbank was brought against him. Long before 
his prime he had become rich, and once rich he 
had set up scruples unknown in his early days. 
He was hard, close-fisted, miserly, if you will, but 



16 WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 

for half his lifetime nobody had brought dishonesty 
home to him. It was quite likely that John Bur- 
bank had no desire to hear again the scathing 
denunciations, the unrelenting abuse, that had 
followed the crash of the Champlain Bank, and 
the failure at Silver Islet. If any misdeed of his 
had provoked his murder, it seemed certain that 
it must date back to the distant and all but for- 
gotten past. 

Twelve months after the Burbank tragedy, the 
Gazette had a brief editorial note recalling the 
case, and remarking that a whole year's diligent 
inquiry had elicited not one ray of light on the 
mystery of St. Jude Street. Often in the interval 
had John Burbank's taking off come into my 
brain. At the core of my mind lay the immovable 
conviction that with me, and with nobody else, 
lay the task of unearthing the assassin. Nearly 
every morning I walked the length of St. Jude 
Street, one of the shortest thoroughfares in the 
city, on my way to business. I never failed to 
glance at the Burbank office window, as though it 
might tell me who had taken the life of the hoary- 
headed merchant. But not by daylight were 
those dust laden-panes to speak to me. 

One night I took supper with a few other mem- 
bers of the Tuque Bleue Club, and afterward we 
wound up with a stroll to the river to see a famous 
skater from Norway. This tall, flaxen-haired 



WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 17 

lad, of scarcely eighteen, glided over the ice as if a 
bird on the wing. His feats of grace and speed 
left our local champions nothing to do but stare 
and applaud. On my way homeward I repassed 
the familiar office window of the Burbank block. 
Now was strangely recalled the night when Gerald 
and I had there watched the old merchant seated 
at his account-books. Then, as now, the air had 
the soft murkiness borne by the first breath of fog. 
At the corner flickered a gas-lamp with the same 
ineffectual gleam as on one memorable night 
years before. Beside the office, along a stretch of 
low ashlar wall, glinted an identical fringe of icicles. 
At my elbow I seemed to hear Gerald, once again, 
hoarse with hatred, "So that's the old scoun- 
drel . " I lagged behind my comrades for a 

moment, oppressed by a rush of long-pent suspi- 
cion. Its burden was the query, "Did Gerald 
Gray kill John Burbank?" Why was it that for 
two whole years Gerald had not paid me a visit? 
Why, in all that time, had he not dropped me a 
single line? Remiss as a correspondent he had 
always been; yet he had never before maintained 
utter silence for so much as a twelvemonth. But 
perhaps his dislike of pen and ink had grown upon 
him. Any day he might mount my stairs and 
hang up his cap and coat as of old. When I 
reached my door I bade my comrades a hurried 
good-night, and climbed to my easy-chair and my 



18 WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 

fire. Then what seemed an impulse from without 
seized me irresistibly. In another moment I was 
in Gerald's room. There, near the window, stood 
the little cedar desk in which he kept his papers. 
Beneath its unlocked lid was there aught to dispel 
the dark suspicion that lay so heavily upon me? 
At once I lighted the gas and opened the desk. It 
contained a few odds and ends of note-paper, half 
a dozen envelopes, and a stick of red sealing-wax. 
In a corner pigeonhole lay two cuttings from a 
Gazette. Were they worth looking at? I took 
them out and smoothed their creases. One of 
them announced real estate for sale at Point St. 
Charles ; the other told that on Tuesday, February 
13th, Benning & Barsalou would sell at auction 
a large consignment of furs from the Northwest. 
This second cutting was at the head of a page. 
In tearing it out the date had remained, February 
12, 1872, the date mortal to John Burbank. 

My breath left me as I read that date. It 
flashed upon my mind that while I had been 
absent in Liverpool, Gerald had come to Place 
d'Armes and occupied as usual this room of his. 
He must have arrived early in the morning and 
left the house that very day, and forever. When 
I had returned from England I had particularly 
inquired of Madame Larue if Mr. Gray had been 
in town during my absence. "Non, monsieur," 
was her answer. But what was the link betwixt 



WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 19 

his brief stay in Place d'Armes and the deadly- 
shot in St. Jude Street? I spent the night repeating 
that question in anguish of mind. All the while 
I had in my soul the assured conviction that my 
bosom friend, my tried and true Gerald Gray, was 
a murderer. But how, and why? occurred to me 
again and again. At daybreak I telegraphed Isaac 
Murray, a leading attorney in Winnipeg, a school- 
mate of Gerald's and mine, asking if he had seen or 
heard anything of Gerald lately. Promptly came 
the reply, "Went east two years ago; no news of 
him since." 

Now, more forcibly than ever before, I recalled 
how sacred to Gerald was friendship, how base, 
how unworthy to live, he deemed a man false to 
a trust. I remembered the threat in his eye as 

he had said, "So that's the old scoundrel . " 

With me Gerald was outspoken in all things. His 
likes and dislikes, much too strong as they were, 
I knew as fully as he did. Against Burbank he 
had no personal grudge whatever. He hated and 
loathed him simply because he had wronged my 
father and impoverished me. And then there 
recurred to my memory Gerald's prophecy that he 
was to come to the same doom as his father. 
Could it be that John Gray's suicide had suggested, 
had indeed caused, the like self-murder of his son? 
Then arose before me a scene with all the vividness 
of a waking dream ; for months it had been slowly 



20 WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 

crystallizing in my brain. When Gerald, for the 
last time, had left this room of his, he sped, in a 
mood of sheer desperation, through St. Jude Street 
on his way to the river. Ever since his soldiering 
days he had carried a loaded revolver; this was 
now reserved as a means of ending his life should 
he find no clear water beyond the docks. He 
soon came to Burbank's window. There sat the 
old miser in his chair, just as Gerald and I had 
seen him a year before. Once again John Burbank 
had looked up, his face betraying a greed all the 
stronger for the death of every other passion. 
Then Gerald thought: "This wretch deserves 
to die. To kill him will add little guilt to my own 
taking off; and who can ever know?" Instantly 
the revolver was aimed and fired. John Burbank 
fell a corpse. His slayer fled unseen to the river, 
and in another moment was in the grasp of its 
swift, concealing waters. Such was my vision: 
in every fiber I know it to be truth. I have 
guarded all this for more than thirty years, and 
now offer it as the explanation of John Burbank's 
slaughter. 

A word or two may close these pages. At the 
morgue, in its gloomy office near the Champ de 
Mars, is kept a record of the remains which rest 
from day to day on the icy tables in the next room. 
None of these records during 1872 described my 
poor Gerald. No corpse of them all had his 



WHO KILLED JOHN BURBANK? 21 

stalwart frame, his dark red hair, his protruding 
forehead. The current which closed over his 
head never gave him up. At this distance from 
his last moments I can peer beneath the ice-laden 
St. Lawrence. There I see his fingers clutch 
drowning stones such as his father clutched as he, 
long before, sank in the whelming river. 



ALL BUT WEDDED 

All ye that are about him bemoan him ; and all ye that know his 
name, say, How is the strong staff broken, and the beautiful rod. 

Jeremiah xlviii., 17. 

In June of 19 16, one of the dread lists of Cana- 
dian youth, sacrificed on the field of honor, in- 
cluded Duncan Briggs of Montreal. When I read 
his name, I was unnerved. All that dismal day it 
was impossible to think of aught but that noble 
boy, manly and brave, cheery and kind to his 
heart's core. My work, such as it was from dawn 
to dusk, had better have been neglected, for it 
was dispatched with my mind three thousand 
miles away. I knew Duncan Briggs from his 
cradle. He was named for a grandfather who was 
one of my closest friends in early life, when the 
strongest ties are woven, when human nature 
is at its warmest and best. 

When Duncan Smith and I were chums, he was 
a thriving builder and landowner. His villa and 
garden adorned a slope of Cote des Neiges, with 
one of the finest prospects in Canada. Where he 
built a home, he foresaw that many other men 



ALL BUT WEDDED 23 

would build homes, too. He bought land boldly, 
and its rise in value made him rich. He had an 
instinct for values in buildings as well as in lands. 
Duncan Smith would explore a factory, a dwelling, 
or a warehouse, and estimate what it would fetch 
at private sale or public auction. His figures 
usually proved to be true within a small fraction. 
When the cotton-mill of Taft & Son burned down, 
old Mr. Taft asked Smith to tell him about 
what outlay would rebuild the mill. Bids were 
duly advertised for, received, and compared; the 
lowest bid was only $700 more than Duncan's 
estimate. 

What was the secret of this talent, which Smith 
shrewdly turned to account again and again? 
It was his glue-pot memory. Day by day he 
noted the prices of brick, of quarry stone, and cut 
stone, of joints and floorings, of roofing, cartage 
and wages, of everything else that a builder paid 
for, and never did a price or a discount fade from 
his brain tablets. And when it came to appraising 
old structures, he was keener still. He was an 
adept in measuring wear and tear, in computing 
the cost of modernizing an out-of-date mansion or 
mill, and, rarest talent of all, he could allow for 
"the temper of the market" with a judgment 
all but infallible. In the midst of a boom, or a 
depression, he used arithmetic as far as arithmetic 
would go; then he employed common sense to 



24 ALL BUT WEDDED 

lift or to lower the numerals jotted down as the 
result of his additions and subtractions. 

Duncan Smith had a keen eye for the beauties 
of Mount Royal Park, and had his life been 
prolonged a year or two, he would have reared 
a memorial to Bernard Devlin, the alderman to 
whom Duncan gave the chief credit for the crea- 
tion of this noble pleasure ground. One Sunday 
afternoon, soon after its paths were opened to 
the public, Duncan and I were walking along 
Dorchester Street, toward Mount Royal, when we 
met John Wilkes, a hardware man in a large way 
of business in St. Paul Street. That meeting, 
and all that sprang from it, recur to my mind to- 
day. It proved to be the most fateful event in 
the long and close friendship betwixt Duncan 
and myself. 

John Wilkes, as we passed him, was strangely 
grizzled for a man hardly more than fifty ; and his 
face betrayed the distress of a heavy and galling 
burden. 

" Poor Wilkes, " said Duncan, "is aging fast. 
He looks as if trade were bad this year, or may- 
be he is out of health?" 

Duncan and I were friends so trusty that I 
told him, "It's a worse trouble than dull times in 
St. Paul Street that afflicts the man. His eldest 
boy has run wild, and won't have much further 
to go if he doesn't pull up very soon." 



ALL BUT WEDDED 25 

"That's dreadful," was Duncan's comment. 
"I don't know Wilkes's wife, but I hear that she 
is as good a woman as he is a man. It must be a 
heart-break when a boy goes wrong that way." 

Nothing more was said about Wilkes or his 
troubles during our stroll, and long before sunset 
we were both at home. About six years passed, 
when one morning, when I was busy drawing up a 
contract of some importance, Duncan burst into 
my office with an abrupt, "May I say a word to 
you at once — in private ? ' ' 

My clerk, Benson, left the room. "Certainly 
you may; be seated." 

Duncan declined a chair, and nervously paced 
the floor as he began: " Five or six summers ago, 
one Sunday afternoon, you and I walked through 
Dorchester Street, to take Guy Street and the 
Cote des Neiges Road to the mountain. Do you 
remember that we met John Wilkes, the hard- 
ware man, near the Gray Nunnery?" 

"We have had many a jaunt together to the 
mountain, but I can't recall that we ever met 
Wilkes as you say. What was there in meeting 
him that has clung to your mind all this while?" 

Duncan drew near to my desk and hoarsely 
whispered: "When we met Wilkes that afternoon 
he was as blanched and downcast as if he had just 
risen from a sick-bed. I thought that he might 
be hard pressed by business worries. Do you 



26 ALL BUT WEDDED 

recollect what you said just after he passed by? 
Do try and think!" 

Vaguely and dimly our talk of six years before 
came back to me. My remark about young 
Wilkes had but repeated the gossip of Jack Russell, 
my old crony, in my room the preceding night. 
As I seldom saw Wilkes, there was nothing to 
deepen or detain the casual impression left by 
what Russell had told me. 

"Was it John Wilkes's son who played Charles 
Surface in the Buckland Dramatic Club, just after 
he left college?" asked Duncan in tremulous tones, 
with dew on his forehead. 

"I'll endeavor to find out, " I answered, recalling 
that Jack Russell's office was near by. As I 
reached for my hat, Duncan cried with trepida- 
tion: "Find out all you can about him. Get his 
Christian name. Ask if he is to be agent of the 
Sterling Bank in Sherbrooke. I'll be here again 
at noon." 

A little before twelve o'clock Duncan stood at 
my desk, where I told him the results of my quest 
that morning. John Wilkes's eldest son, Philip, 
was a man of twenty-seven or twenty-eight. A 
double portion of his father's address and courtesy 
had descended to him. Brisk and kindly he made 
friends wherever he went. His education had not 
ended at college; it would last as long as he lived, 
for his mind was not only active, but hospitable 



ALL BUT WEDDED 27 

to new ideas. He had only to behave himself 
to reach the forefront as a banker. But an 
obstacle bestrode his path: he was hand-in-glove 
with newly enriched miners and financiers, who 
found him a delightful companion, with an amusing 
streak behind his wide information and good 
sense. Of late Philip had shown plain tokens of 
overmuch dining and wining, and this his chieftains 
of the Sterling Bank could not possibly ignore. 

As my recital proceeded, Duncan's excitement 
rose from one extreme to another, "Good God!" 
he ejaculated, ' ' my daughter Agnes is to marry that 
man three weeks hence, and her wedding invita- 
tions are in the engraver's hands to-day. What you 
said to me years ago about a young Wilkes stuck 
to my memory and suddenly returned to my 
mind as soon as I was awake this morning. I 
never liked that infernal scamp. He has infatu- 
ated my poor Agnes with his smooth talk and 
gushy compliments. She must shake loose from 
him, I say!" 

During these stormy moments more and more 
of our chat of long ago reentered my brain. 
I could now recall the young railroad engineer 
who had played Joseph Surface to Wilkes's Charles 
Surface in The School for Scandal at the Buckland 
Academy, and who had been his room-mate at 
the Metropolitan Club. Where was this Silas 
Wright to be found? He had left Montreal for 



28 ALL BUT WEDDED 

Kingston, I learned, where his father was a rich 
foundryman. Duncan, when I told him all this, 
fairly shouted, "Do you know this man, his 
father?" 

"Yes, I have met him half a dozen times in 
business conferences. Once we traveled together 
from Montreal to Brockville. He is a thoroughly 
sound, trustworthy man. I'll try and find out 
about him and his son this afternoon. Call at 
six o'clock, and I will tell you what I hear." 

My inquiries, in the next hour or two, revealed 
that Philip Wilkes had begun to throw discretion 
to the winds. He was a frequent player at a 
notorious gambling den in University Street, 
where one night recently he had lost nearly a 
thousand dollars before he went home. It was 
possible that the board of the Sterling Bank would 
soon call this officer of theirs to order, if they had 
not done so already. All my informants were 
agreed that Silas Wright knew more than anybody 
else as to the unfitness of Philip Wilkes for the 
union soon to be solemnized. A brief parley and 
Duncan Smith and I determined that he and I 
should go at once to Kingston, confront Silas 
Wright and force him, if possible, to a disclosure 
that would annul the betrothal of Philip Wilkes 
to Agnes Smith. 

We took the night express, and left it at Kingston 
Station in the gray murk of the next morning. We 



ALL BUT WEDDED 29 

wasted an hour, much to Duncan's exasperation, 
in rinding Mr. Wright's house, perched as it was on 
a hillside in an out-of-the-way suburb. When we 
were ushered, after more delay, into Mr. Wright's 
presence, we found him to be a gentleman of the 
old school. The source of his son's good breeding 
and fine manner became plain at once. Over- 
whelmed by emotion, Duncan bade me, as his 
closest friend, explain our errand to Mr. Wright. 
This I did as briefly and clearly as I could. As I 
came to the end of my story Mr. Wright bewildered 
us both by bursting into tears. "Haven't you 
heard," he sobbed, "that poor Silas is in the 
Kingston Insane Asylum? For six weeks past 
he has been confined in the violent ward. His 
evil courses have brought him there at last. He 
led a wrong life in Montreal, and in Kingston he 
went from bad to worse. Mr. Smith, your 
daughter is as dear to you as Silas is to me ! My 
son's desk has two or three packets of letters, 
most of them from Montreal. Under all the 
circumstances, his hopeless lunacy and your dis- 
tressing doubts, I am justified in looking through 
those letters, and giving you any of them you 
wish." 

We went upstairs forthwith to the little sitting- 
room of Silas Wright, overlooking Lake Ontario. 
His father unlocked an oaken desk, labeled draw- 
ings, reports, estimates, and so on. In an upper 



30 ALL BUT WEDDED 

pigeon-hole were letters in their envelopes, just 
as they had come to hand, with a rubber band 
holding them together. Mr. Wright opened 
them out rapidly, one after another, until he came 
to a note which he passed, with a trembling hand, 
to me. It was signed "Phil," and its purport 
was startling indeed. It disclosed a barefaced 
forgery at the Sterling Bank, where detection 
could be escaped only by the instant remittance 
of three thousand dollars. This large amount had 
been gathered with no small difficulty and sent to 
Philip Wilkes. To my query, "May we have this 
note?" Mr. Wright responded "Yes." 

Once more in Montreal, Duncan speeded to his 
house, I to mine. Now for an unexpected turn 
in this strange affair. Agnes Smith firmly refused 
to break off her engagement with Wilkes. She 
declared to her father, "I love him with all my 
heart and soul. Silas Wright has betrayed him, 
but he will be a true husband to me, and I will be 
steadfast to him while breath remains in my 
body." 

But Yes or No rested with a spirit stronger than 
hers. When Philip Wilkes knew that evidence 
of his guilt had come from Kingston, he broke off 
his match that instant. As soon as he could 
pack his belongings he resigned from the Sterling 
Bank, and removed to Hepatica, a new village in 
Northern Manitoba, where a younger brother 



ALL BUT WEDDED 31 

gave him a berth in his railroad office. In less 
than two years Wilkes died of pleurisy, his end 
undoubtedly hastened by intemperance. 

And what of Agnes Smith: did she pine away 
and die because her first lover proved to be a 
drunkard and a forger? By no means. Within 
a year she was wooed and won by Walter Briggs, 
a young electrician who had been in the service 
of Mr. Edison in his laboratory at Orange. And 
thus Agnes Smith became Mrs. Agnes Briggs, 
and her first-born son was the golden-hearted boy 
who fell at Ypres. He was Duncan Smith over 
again, with the twist in his eyebrow and the 
canniness in his eye that came from his grand- 
father. More still: he had his grandfather's 
memory from which no record, however slight and 
brief, ever took wing. He enlisted as a private: 
his intelligence in a few months carried him step 
by step to a captaincy. Nothing but grim death, 
I am certain, kept Captain Briggs from reaching 
a general command. 



AN ILL WIND 

It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer: but when he is gone 
Jhis way, then he boasteth. Proverbs xx., 14. 

John Fitch, who sank in the Empress of Ireland 
in May of 19 16, was a man with a nose for money, 
if such a man ever lived. He used to buy Christ- 
mas wares in January, when they were half-price, 
and stow. them away in his attic, with a disdain 
for the three per cent, per annum of savings- 
banks. In like manner he bought his straw hats 
in September and his furs in May. Never beyond 
June did he postpone filling his cellar with anthra- 
cite. "Buy," he used to tell his boys, "when 
folks want to sell, and sell when folks want to 
buy." He was not much beyond forty when he 
retired from active toil, thenceforward living 
comfortably on his income from investments. 
This was noteworthy, for John Fitch inherited 
nothing, so that he had to earn and save every 
dollar of his tidy fortune. Four years before his 
death, one Sunday afternoon at Murray Bay, 
we were strolling together when Uncle John, as 
we called him, dropped into a vein of reminiscence. 

32 



AN ILL WIND 33 

He spoke of the prodigious rise in northwestern 
land values, which had brought corner lots in 
Winnipeg to prices which would have been deemed 
high for the best-placed land in Montreal. ' ' Yes, 
said he, "if I were a young man, it is in Manitoba 
that I would start. The eastern provinces have 
had their day. Why, when I was a boy, Fort 
Garry, where Winnipeg is now, wasn't down on 
our school map at all. Until I was a man grown 
I never saw an atlas that showed it." 

"Where, Mr. Fitch, did you begin work in 
Montreal? I think you were born there." 

"Yes. I was born in Cote Street, close to 
Craig Street. When I was fourteen I was given 
a desk in the Eagle Insurance Office, Place 
d'Armes, where my roundhand looked rather 
well, if I do say it, on the big, white policy 
sheets. That post came to me through a friend of 
my father's, Colonel David Sangster of the Car- 
biniers, by all odds the most popular militiaman of 
that distant day. He was a fine figure, I can tell 
you, on a Queen's birthday parade in Logan's 
Farm or the Champ de Mars. He had for a good 
while enjoyed a decent income as a broker in bonds 
and mortgages, but his revenue shrank under the 
competition of notarial middlemen. And besides, 
his habits were so convivial that he seldom ap- 
peared at his office until eleven o'clock or so; and 
even in the seventies a good deal of business was 



34 AN ILL WIND 

dispatched by early risers before eleven had 
struck. 

"His office was only a few doors from the Eagle 
Insurance building, and one afternoon I met the 
colonel at his door, when he bade me come in. 
He grumbled loudly about unfair rivalry from 
notaries, and even from barristers, who were 
bringing his commissions close to zero. This 
was by way of preface and preparation. With a 
little shame-facedness he continued. 'Within a 
week I have a note for two hundred dollars matur- 
ing at the Merchants' Bank, and I don't know 
where the cash is to come from. It would never 
do for Rae, the manager, to know that I am under 
pressure this fall. He is a trustee of the Muckle 
Estate, and collecting their rents nets me much 
more than four hundred a year, let me tell you.' 

"'When,' I asked, 'do you expect to be in 
funds?' 

"'Oh, in about sixty days, when my Hawkes- 
bury commissions fall due.' 

" In a wave of sympathy, which to-day would be 
several degrees less warm, I said, ' Let me give 
you a check for $200 and take your note payable 
December 31.' 

" ' Thank you, my boy, ' answered the old fellow, 
with tears close to his eyes. Then and there my 
check and his note were exchanged, and I sped 
forth to catch the next train for Vaudreuil.' 



AN ILL WIND 35 

"In strict accordance with the calendar, De- 
cember 31st came around, to be heralded by a call 
from Colonel Sangster. It was easy to read in his 
woe-begone air that my note was not to be paid. 
Worse yet : his furniture in Durocher Street was 
threatened with seizure for $170 rent. His 
Hawkesbury commissions had gone to clamorous 
butchers, bakers, and coal dealers, who obstinately 
refused to wait any longer for their money. In 
October he had not fully revealed his desperate 
straits. What he had then held back now came 
out, and in dismaying detail. 

" ' One hundred more will save me, will positively 
save me from ruin. Don't say no, ' the wretched 
old man cried at the end of a tearful appeal. 

"His distress moved me. At that moment I 
had little more than a hundred dollars left in my 
savings-bank, but I lent the Colonel what he 
asked for, with his assurance of payment in full 
by the end of March, or by the beginning of April 
at farthest. 

"You can guess the sequel. April came and 
the Colonel was in a worse plight than ever. When 
I called upon him one afternoon I noticed that his 
hands were tremulous and that his jowl bore new 
streaks of crimson. Why had I not observed his 
plain tokens of intemperance long ago? It was 
daylight clear that I would never see a penny of 
what he owed me. In a tone that was almost 



36 AN ILL WIND 

maudlin he asked, ' Could you oblige me with ten 
dollars until to-morrow, or even five, if that's all 
you have in your wallet ? ' 

" 'No,' I responded, roundly and firmly, for at 
last I was thoroughly disgusted and alarmed. 
1 Tell me, here and now, what your debts are, and 
how you intend to pay them off. 

" 'Despite his weakness, the Colonel was a gen- 
tleman, and I felt a measure of pity as he jotted 
down on a tablet so much for office rent, so much 
more for house rent, a considerable score to Labrie, 
the butcher in Bonsecours Market, and nearly as 
much to Beard, the coal merchant. 

'"Then there's the three hundred due to you,' 
he added. 

" 'And what have you to pay me with?' 

" ' I have a few worthless shares of stock in one 
company and another. You may take any part 
of them you like, or the whole lot for that matter. 
Five years ago I was fool enough to subscribe for 
twelve shares of Edison Electric stock when my 
schoolmate, Gerald Gibbs, came here canvassing. 
Do you care to take transfer of that scrip? One 
of these days it will be worth something. Why 
not take it and hold it?' 

"Next day those shares were transferred to me, 
and with no expectation on my part that they 
would ever be worth the paper they were printed 
on. At that time the Edison concern carried a 



AN ILL WIND 37 

mortgage for half a million dollars, much more 
than the value of the property, and the directors 
had all they could do to pay interest on their huge 
debt. Few indeed were the men in Montreal at 
that time, or in America, for that matter, who 
foresaw the immense expansion of electrical in- 
dustries which has taken place within the past 
thirty years. But from month to month the earn- 
ings of the Edison Company steadily rose, if not 
as rapidly as its shareholders wished, and there was 
a plain promise of dividends to shareholders of 
patience and faith. But investors of that kind 
are scarce ; most men soon tire of carrying a stock 
that yields them nothing, they get cold feet, as 
the saying is, so that I picked up at five to ten 
cents on the dollar more than two hundred shares 
of Edison stock. Then, one winter, as in the 
bursting of a flower, there was a distinct boom in 
electric lighting. It became fashionable for Edison 
lamps to replace gas-burners, and between Novem- 
ber and May our receipts took a jump that made 
a dividend a certainty. In June four per centum 
was duly paid, and shares that had once gone 
begging at five cents on the dollar were now hard 
to get at par. There was good reason to expect 
a steady increase of profits, as year followed year. 
All this came to pass, and, as you know, even the 
original investors, who paid par for their stock, 
more than doubled their capital by sitting tight. 



38 AN ILL WIND 

"One morning a railroad contractor of large 
means told me that he would like to see his son a 
director of the Edison Company. What would 
I take for my shares? One hundred and fifteen, 
I replied. He demurred at my price, but only 
for a moment, and closed with me then and there. 
I never regretted the sale, although Edison stock 
went beyond two hundred in less than three years 
afterward. With the cash Broadgauge handed 
me, I bought low-priced stocks with a future. 
In every case but one, I repeated my good fortune 
in my electrical venture. It was in a Cobalt mine 
that I met my only loss. No more holes in the 
ground for me. When my forty-first birthday came 
round I had enough to take care of me pleasantly 
for the remainder of my life. What more could I 
ask? It seemed an ill wind indeed when Colonel 
Sangster couldn't pay me that three hundred 
dollars. But I have good reason to be glab 
that he couldn't. Rest his soul ! " 



A TELL-TALE PALM 

The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau. 

Genesis xxvii., 22. 

Montreal thirty years ago was shaken to its 
center when the frauds of its leading notary, David 
Brimmer, came to light. His books disclosed a 
course of swindling that dated from the very 
beginning of his practice. Before his abrupt de- 
parture for San Francisco, he studied the crim- 
inal law of California, and of every other state 
and territory between Montreal and the Golden 
Gate. Their statutes, bearing marks of frequent 
reference, filled three shelves in his professional 
library. During weeks of examination by the 
official accountants, his depredations grew to 
figures ever larger and larger. And while it was 
plain that he had repeatedly committed forgery, 
no document actually forged, remained in his 
office, or could be found in the registrar's vaults, 
or anywhere else. His iniquities, many and 
heinous though they were, would not subject him 
to the slightest legal inconvenience in his new 
home. 

39 



40 A TELL-TALE PALM 

Brimmer's case happily stands alone in the 
annals of Quebec. No other culprit has ever 
descended in an honored profession to share his 
shame in this Province. As a leading notary he 
came into control of several large estates, two of 
them owned in London. He was so shrewd and 
able a man that he was sought as an adviser by 
his clients in many a considerable investment, 
whether in lands, bonds, or other securities. 

Miss Jean Currey, a kinswoman of mine, of 
good Edinburgh stock, had long been a client of 
David Brimmer's. He had drawn the will by 
which her uncle, Desmond, had bequeathed her 
the bulk of his fortune. His estate passed through 
Brimmer's hands in its division among the heirs; 
and the notary's suggestions decided Miss Cur- 
rey's investment of her legacy. Brimmer, saga- 
cious man that he was, advised her to buy land on 
St. Catherine Street, soon to become the main 
thoroughfare of Montreal, he felt sure. His 
forecast has proved sound, and his disinterested- 
ness in that instance was unmistakable — appar- 
ently. Her purchase concluded, Miss Currey 
had still fifteen thousand dollars to invest, and for 
this amount Brimmer recommended a first mort- 
gage on a Sherbrooke mill. Miss Currey consented 
to his proposal; the notary duly visited Sher- 
brooke, he told her, to inspect the mill and obtain 
the signatures of its owners. When he handed 



A TELL-TALE PALM 41 

his client her mortgage he said that every quarter- 
day she would receive through him a check for 
her interest. His promise was kept to the letter, 
and what could be more satisfactory? Uncle 
Desmond died in November, 1878, and these trans- 
actions with Brimmer took place in the follow- 
ing January. In all her affairs Miss Currey, 
sensible soul that she was, acted for herself, but 
only after much consultation with friends and 
neighbors, first and chiefly taking "an advice" 
from her brother John, senior partner in a solid 
importing concern in St. Helen Street. 

As John Currey knew David Brimmer there 
was nothing in his manner, nor his methods, to 
excite an iota of distrust. Honest and fair he 
certainly seemed. Every deed he drew was as 
direct and simple as legal formality permitted. 
When his bills were rendered, they were usually 
less than his clients expected. To be sure his 
entertainments were frequent, and on a handsome 
scale. But how natural to suppose that he had 
an income much surpassing his outgo. People 
were wont to remark that a notary, especially 
when he was the trusted officer of a big bank, such 
as the Bullion Bank, had scores of opportunities 
to invest at the right time, and to take profitable 
"flyers" in St. Francis Xavier Street. Canny 
John Currey had heard all this more than once, 
but he never knew of any specific bargain or 



42 A TELL-TALE PALM 

speculation that had enriched David Brimmer. 
Yet gossip, ill-natured as it is held to be, never 
once assailed the fair name of our notary. 

Long remembered was the day when his ab- 
sconding became certain. At first his absence 
from town gave rise to no comment. He often 
took brief trips to Toronto, Quebec, or New York. 
This time, his head clerk said, he had gone to 
Albany on business of importance, and would 
return within a week. At last it was clear that 
Brimmer was a defaulter and a consummate trick- 
ster and thief. Distressing scenes from hour to hour 
were witnessed by his staff who, for all that 
engrossers and copyists are not among the most 
susceptible mortals, showed uneasiness at the 
shriekings that made their desks ring again, and at 
the collapses that brought the faded office sofa into 
requisition at least once every morning. Widows 
whose sole reliance had been a few thousands 
collected from a life insurance policy ; gray-headed 
teachers and business women, eking out their sup- 
port from the interest drawn from their savings; 
orphans and wards ignorant of the smallest detail 
of business; executors who had left trust-funds in 
the hands of the absconder — these, with creditors 
of an everyday stamp, bewailed the rascality of a 
man who had deceived them grossly, but — with 
the boundary line betwixt them — not with any 
risk of punishment. 



A TELL-TALE PALM 43 

Miss Jean Currey for three days after the mourn- 
ful Monday when the absconding was published 
in The Gazette was called upon by scores of friends 
ready to condole with her in the loss they assumed 
her to have sustained. Everybody who knew 
Miss Currey knew that Brimmer was her notary 
and her trusted man of business. She was not a 
cynical woman, but she saw plain tokens of dis- 
appointment, rather than of relief, when she de- 
clared herself to have escaped scot free from the 
nets floated so widely by David Brimmer. Little 
more than three months ago he had paid her the 
fifteen thousand dollars she had advanced on the 
Sherbrooke mortgage. Miss Currey credited this 
good fortune to her brother John. He, in his 
turn, credited his old friend, Joe Field, whose 
agency entered the case strangely enough. 

For none of his friends had John Currey a warmer 
spot in his heart than for Joe Field. Many a 
game of chess had they played together, and John 
cheerfully acknowledged that Joe could beat him 
at will, and then he would explain, "Why Joe is 
the best player in Montreal, or in Canada, for 
that matter." Apart from the chess-board, Joe 
was capital company; he could sing, he played 
both the piano and the 'cello, he was good at 
spinning yarns, and rare quality in a yarn-spinner, 
he seldom repeated himself. Among his various 
accomplishments was an intimate acquaintance 



44 A TELL-TALE PALM 

with the art and mystery of palmistry — in which 
he professed his unwavering belief, as he was soon 
to prove in a striking way. 

Toward the close of 1883 the Risleys of Dor- 
chester Street gave their annual big Christmas 
party. Fully a hundred guests had assembled 
under the mistletoe that evening, when Grandpapa 
Risley, a disciple of Field's, suggested that Field 
should display to the company his remarkable 
powers as a palmist. Joe consented at once — 
in his make-up there was no atom of mock modesty. 
Seated behind the portiere which divided in halves 
the big drawing-room, Joe scanned the palms which 
were thrust at him through the damask. He had 
all the solemnity of a medical instructor at a clinic 
as his words fell in measured tones. One of his 
first subjects was John Currey. Joe said nothing 
that John could remember except that his palm 
indicated a turn for public speaking. If this 
decided gift were cultivated, it would lead to 
distinction at the bar, or in politics. Joe here 
struck upon a talent, coupled with a hidden 
ambition, so deep in his friend's heart that it 
had never been divulged to mortal. 

When nearly everybody in the group surround- 
ing John had been "read," a lucky impulse led 
John Currey to test Joe's memory, and for a 
second time he passed his hand through the 
portiere. 



A TELL-TALE PALM 45 

"Not fair, " sung out Joe. I've read that hand 
already to-night." 

Its owner, somewhat abashed, retired to make 
room for David Brimmer with his broad, ruddy 
hand. His characteristics were hit off cleverly 
by the palmist. Brimmer was informed that he 
was a man of detail, of indomitable industry, so 
fond of art that if blest with fortune he couldn't 
help collecting pictures, and so on. A few minutes 
more and Joe had read his last palm, and the 
company adjourned to the supper- room. Not a 
few of us, John Currey for one, were fain to believe 
that "there is something in palmistry after all," 
especially when its exponent was so discerning as 
"Professor "Field. 

Two or three days after the Risley party John 
Currey was entering the City Club about one 
o'clock, for his usual sandwich, when he heard a 
familiar voice, "John, sit here, can't you?" 

It was Joe Field at luncheon. 

"Well, Joe, that was a rare evening's fun we 
had at Risley 's last Tuesday, thanks to you." 

"O, yes," said Joe, "it was a pleasant enough 
party. By the way, John, you put out your 
hand at me twice, didn't you?" 

"I did." 

Leaning forward cautiously, Joe whispered, 
" I say, John, do you remember whose hand came 
after yours was offered a second time? " 



46 A TELL-TALE PALM 

"Of course I do. It was David Brimmer's. 
You told him that he was a master of detail, a 
most industrious worker, a lover of pictures, and 
so on." 

"Did I? Well, I could have said something 
more. Strictly between us, if there's anything in 
the hand, that man stretches out his palm for 
what isn't his'n, and is precious close about it, 
too." 

"Nonsense, Joe, you'd better be careful. He 
is notary to the Bullion Bank. He is one of the 
trustiest men on earth." 

"Is he? Then why has he every mark of a 
thief on his palm and his fingers? I warn you, 
John, to be on your guard against that chap. 
He's not only a thief, but a thoroughly hard- 
hearted scamp. Or let me say at once, he has no 
heart at all. Why, his line of the heart is nowhere." 

Joe Field was in dead earnest, and Currey was 
astonished to hear his unsparing condemnation 
of a man he believed worthy of the utmost con- 
fidence. As the two separated, Joe said, "I've 
quite reliance enough on palmistry to be very sorry 
to trust Brimmer with a penny of my cash." Then 
reflecting on the fewness of his possessions he 
added, "Or anybody else's." 

At seven o'clock John Currey was dining at 
home, with his wife and his sister Jean. After 
a pleasant family chat Jean told him that, within 



A TELL-TALE PALM 47 

a week, her mortgage on the Sherbrooke mill 
would fall due. Mr. Brimmer said that the 
borrowers, Perry & Bell, wished to pay it off. 
For reinvestment he suggested that the cash be 
left in his hands, or, as he phrased it, "in his 
office." 

"You know," quoth the good woman, "Mr. 
Brimmer has clients who do not wish their names 
mentioned, and who give him abundant security 
for their borrowings. He says that often he can 
get seven per cent., and Mr. Brimmer is always so 
punctual." 

"Did you agree to his proposal?" her brother 
asked. 

"I told him that I probably should, but that 
I would consult you first." 

"Well, Jean, all that I have to say is don't let 
him, or anyone else, have] your money without 
security given you openly and aboveboard. I 
don't like his talk about seven per cent, either. 
Why money is not worth more than five to-day, 
on such security as you ought to have." 

As John spoke, his convictions grew firmer. 
He continued, "Jean, you can buy two more 
lots on St. Catherine Street, a little beyond 
Atwater Avenue, and they'll come out better 
than anything Brimmer can offer you. Just you 
insist on handling your own money." 

John's counsels prevailed. His sister felt that 



48 A TELL-TALE PALM 

an experience vastly wider than her own had 
formed his convictions. Early next morning she 
began to negotiate for the St. Catherine Street 
property. Next came a call at Mr. Brimmer's, 
that he might learn her decision. When she 
stated it, clearly and firmly, she might have ob- 
served in Brimmer's face, had she scanned it, a 
shifting of the polite mask which he habitually 
wore. A coarse and greedy look flitted across his 
grizzled features as he curtly said: "Well, Miss 
Currey, I have advised you in the past somewhat 
to your advantage, I think, and do so now. If you 
consult others, and prefer their advice, I have 
nothing to say. Be kind enough to call with 
Perry & Bell's mortgage next Thursday, and I will 
have much pleasure in handing you a check for 
fifteen thousand dollars, with three months' in- 
terest." And he bowed her out with almost a 
full measure of his accustomed cordiality. 

When John Currey heard how promptly Brim- 
mer meant to repay the mortgage loan to his 
sister, his conscience tingled a little. Was it 
right to question the integrity of this man who, 
after all, may have spoken the truth regarding 
the needs of clients whose capital was temporarily 
locked up? Was it fair to entertain a prejudice 
against him, largely based on the shady art of 
which lying gypsies were the best known practi- 
tioners? But in any event Jean's new purchase 



A TELL-TALE PALM 49 

would prove not only safe, but profitable, a very 
different case from lending on a mortgage. In 
another moment the subject had vanished from 
his thoughts. 

With his habitual punctuality Brimmer paid 
Miss Currey her check on the following Thursday, 
and she handed him her deed of mortgage on the 
Sherbrooke mill. Another week and she had 
bought two more lots on St. Catherine Street. 
Within three months came Brimmer's flight, with 
all the loss and anguish of his victims. One of 
the first men John Currey met after the news 
flashed through the city was Joe Field. 

"Something in science after all, John, eh?" 
And he opened and shut his fat little fist sug- 
gestively. Joe had read in Brimmer's palm 
characteristics not betrayed in his face, or dis- 
closed in his public life. The amateur reader 
of palms had saved Jean Currey a goodly slice of 
her possessions. In her case, as in every other, 
the rascally notary had taken pains to destroy 
every trace of daring forgery. It was soon 
discovered that never had Perry & Bell, of Sher- 
brooke, granted a mortgage on their mill. Brim- 
mer had regularly paid the interest on a loan 
for which during five years Miss Currey had held 
a bogus deed. To repay her that fifteen thou- 
sand dollars must have sadly bothered him, and 
his coolness, as he politely handed Miss Currey 



50 A TELL-TALE PALM 

her check, showed the man's amazing command 
of himself. 

Six months after Brimmer's disappearance, 
Philip Macdonald, of Montreal, saw him in Mont- 
gomery Street, the chief thoroughfare of San Fran- 
cisco. He was quick of pace, jaunty of step, and 
why not? In crossing the forty-fifth parallel of 
latitude had not Crime become as blameless as 
Innocence? 



A PUZZLING CASE 

Our cashier is shrewd in his look, 
As his gaze is glued to his book: 
I had toddy one gill, 
It was two in my bill ; 
J' Double entry," explained Obed Cook. 

Daniel De Courcy. 

Much has been said regarding the gain reaped 
by a traveler. He sees new cities, he observes 
foreign populations in their homes, he remarks 
codes and customs widely divergent from those of 
his native land. He discovers that, after all, this 
is a pretty big planet, with strange varieties of 
human beings scattered across its breadths. In 
many respects the landlord of a hotel has much 
the same experience, day by day, that comes to a 
traveler as he journeys across oceans and conti- 
nents. Without the cost and trouble of leaving his 
own threshold, Spaniards and Swedes, Danes and 
Dutchmen, explorers of mark, physicists of the 
first rank, with many more as distinguished, come 
beneath his roof and shake his hand, every twelve- 
month of his life. If our Boniface keeps the one 
good hotel in his city, and if his city, to-wit, Mon- 

5i 



52 A PUZZLING CASE 

treal, is a city of distinction, he is more fortunate 
in his post than if his door opened upon either 
Piccadilly or Broadway. In London and New 
York visitors of note are distributed among scores 
of hostelries, so that no single register can boast as 
many famous names as those recorded at the Done- 
gani Hotel in the old days. 

I wonder how many Montrealers remember Joe 
Daly, the major-domo of the Donegani? He was 
a man born for his place. He was courtesy and 
helpfulness incarnate : he carried into the business 
of hotel-keeping the best traditions of true and 
abounding hospitality. He could arrange drives 
to Lachine, Sault-au-Recollet, and Bout de l'lsle 
as easily as around the mountain. His card gave 
its bearer access to the collections of pictures which 
even in that early day were to be seen in Montreal. 
The best private library in the city, rich in original 
records, opened its doors to every scholar intro- 
duced by Joe Daly. And his friends included 
Dr. Murphy, who had a superb collection of coins 
and medals, shown to anyone who came from the 
Donegani to the Doctor's surgery in Craig Street. 

One winter evening, a few months before the 
close of Joe's life, we sat chatting in front of a glow- 
ing fire in a parlor facing Dalhousie Square. Our 
talk drifted into theater-going, and the famous 
actors who had played in Montreal. Daly clearly 
recalled Charles Dickens who was, he declared, 



A PUZZLING CASE 53 

every whit as great an actor as a novelist. The 
same sympathy which enabled him to impersonate 
Mr. Pickwick sharpened his pen when he portrayed 
Mr. Pickwick. No tragedian had impressed him 
more than Edwin Forrest. Next to him he placed 
Junius Brutus Booth, father of Edwin Booth. 
"But," quoth Daly, "the best actors are not on 
the stage at all. For thirty years all that I have 
had to do in this hotel has been to keep my eyes 
and ears open, to enjoy a great deal better acting 
than was ever put on the boards of the Theater 
Royal. One case in particular stands out in my 
memory to-night. When did the Crimean War 
come to an end?" 

"In 1856." 

"Well, then, in the fall of that year a young Eng- 
lish lieutenant, who had fought at Sebastopol, 
came to the Donegani, and engaged a small front 
room on the top floor. He had the address and 
manners of a gentleman, and I took a liking to him 
at once. He told me that he had come to Canada 
to look about him before investing, ' to spy out the 
land, ' as he put it. But neither from me nor from 
anyone else, so far as I heard, did he ever inquire 
as to land values, business opportunities, or the 
prospects of Montreal as a port — a subject at that 
time much in the minds of Montreal folk. 

"Ralph Beardsley, as he called himself, soon 
made friends right and left. Among these were 



54 A PUZZLING CASE 

two Sherbrooke Street families so old and wealthy 
that they were the acknowledged leaders of Mon- 
treal society. In both households he established 
so firm a footing that he could drop in for afternoon 
tea as if he had been born a Molson or a Frothing- 
ham. Every week of his stay widened his circle 
of acquaintances, and heightened his popularity. 
He joined the Garrison Dramatic Club; and his 
voice, a capital baritone, was heard in the choir 
of St. John the Evangelist. Half a dozen of his 
chums were officers in the Grenadier Guards and 
the Scots Fusiliers. One bitter cold afternoon in 
February, a score of these robust young soldiers 
tramped on snowshoes to Lachine, with Beardsley 
as one of their party. On the homeward trudge 
they had a stiff gale in their faces, and Beardsley 
was chilled to the marrow. Next day he couldn't 
leave his bed, as a victim of what was then called 
'inflammation of the lungs,' and is now dubbed 
'pneumonia.' Three or four days passed, and 
then Dr. Craik, our leading physician of that day, 
told me that Beardsley was not responding to his 
treatment, and that he feared the worst for his 
patient. I went at once to room 81, Beardsley 's 
quarters, and his ashy face and obstructed breath- 
ing fairly frightened me. But even on his sick bed 
he was a gentleman, and he welcomed me with his 
customary politeness. 'What does Craik think 
of my case?' he asked. 



A PUZZLING CASE 55 

" ' He finds you losing a little strength every day. 
Let us hope for your speedy recovery as soon as the 
crisis is past, but it will do you only good to arrange 
your affairs, so that you may dismiss them from 
your mind, and have nothing to do but to get 
well. ' 

"'I suppose I had better make a will — my first 
will, not my last — if I can help it. ' 

"Within an hour or so I ushered James Smith 
into room 81. He was our foremost notary, and 
a man worthy of a seat on the Bench. His client, 
in a hoarse whisper, but with a brain as clear as 
crystal, dictated as nearly as I can remember: 
'To McGill College, in token of gratitude to its 
principal, Doctor Dawson, five hundred pounds. 
To the Montreal General Hospital, whose chief 
of staff is Doctor Craik, three hundred pounds. 
To the Church of St. John the Evangelist, for its 
charitable fund, two hundred pounds. My per- 
sonal jewelry, my watch, and other effects in this 
hotel, to my friend Joseph Daly. The remainder 
of my estate, real and personal, wherever situated, 
my lawful debts paid, to my honored father, John 
Joseph Beardsley of Beardsley Manor, Frome, 
Somersetshire, England. ' 

"His concluding words were uttered more and 
more slowly. It was with difficulty that the notary 
caught them for the leaf before him. That leaf 
was duly signed, with a scrawl nearly illegible, 



56 A PUZZLING CASE 

and was then duly attested and sealed by our friend 
Smith. 

"Beardsley retained consciousness for about a 
week after that. Then at six o'clock one morning 
he breathed his last. His funeral was attended by 
twoscore of his coterie, although the day was 
stormy and unusually cold. At Mount Royal 
Cemetery the coffin was placed in a receiving vault 
until we could hear from Beardsley's father, to 
whom the sad news of his son's death was promptly 
communicated. When we returned to the hotel, 
we assembled in this very parlor, and James Smith 
read Beardsley's will. There was a distinct hum 
of grateful acknowledgment for the legacies to 
McGill, to the hospital, and to the Rev. Edmund 
Wood's church. A month passed before I heard 
from Mr. Beardsley, senior. He was no squire 
residing in a ' manor, ' but simply a clergyman of 
no estate whatever, who had educated his son at 
Balliol College in Oxford. There his talents had 
won him a prize of one hundred guineas for a 
translation from Euripides. Ralph Beardsley, so 
far from holding any real or personal property in 
England, had left debts exceeding six hundred 
pounds behind him. 

"At first he had punctually paid his bills at the 
Donegani. But latterly he had been remiss at the 
cashier's desk, blaming his 'London agent' who 
was dilatory in collecting and remitting his ' rents. ' 



A PUZZLING CASE 57 

Beardsley died owing the hotel, I am ashamed to 
say, more than three hundred dollars. And what 
about the jewelry and other effects bequeathed to 
me? At an auction, conducted by Mr. Devany 
six months later, they netted $14.10, every penny 
of their value. A hotel keeper in a border city like 
Montreal is much exposed to swindlers and con- 
fidence-men of all kinds. I have known all sorts 
of them, from Southerners with the suavity of 
Henry Clay or Chesterfield himself, to rough-and- 
ready pikers who seemed too uncouth to be play- 
ing a part. In the long procession of them I give 
the first place to Ralph Beardsley, whose acting 
was so perfect that he deceived as old and seasoned 
a stager as myself." 

"But why, " I asked, "did he keep up his fraud 
on his deathbed. We expect a man to tell the 
truth there, if anywhere?" 

Joe was silent for a few moments, then he said : 
"He was bluffing, never supposing that death 
would call his bluff. And rumor had it that he 
was engaged to Miss Bullion, the heiress of Hoche- 
laga. Had he lived to wed her, Ralph would have 
been a rich man. " 



SHADOWS BEFORE 

He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. St. Matthew xi., 15. 

How time flies ! It is quite forty years ago that 
the Montreal press published tidings of a bank- 
ruptcy that astounded its readers, old and young. 
Sawyer & Sons, the leather firm in St. Paul Street, 
had failed ! To-day Montreal is so big and many- 
sided a city ; its huge business is divided among so 
many strong concerns, that it is hard to recall the 
full shock of that failure. In the early seventies, 
when I was a lad, the Sawyers were the acknowl- 
edged leaders of the Canadian leather trade, both 
as manufacturers and merchants. In those days 
the notion of Sawyer & Sons stopping payment 
would have been the same as supposing Mr. 
Lamothe, the postmaster, ceasing to sell stamps; 
or Mr. Delisle, the collector of customs, declining 
the acceptance of duties. But it was nevertheless 
true: this famous old firm, which again and again 
had weathered panics and hard times, had gone 
to the wall at last, with no preliminary sign of 
weakness, so far as public observation went. 

58 



SHADOWS BEFORE 59 

And this bankruptcy, as its details came out 
day by day, proved to be one of the worst in 
Canadian annals. Large sums had been borrowed 
from brothers-in-law and cousins of the partners ; 
these debts, in every case, had been much reduced 
that winter by transfers of goods and machinery at 
prices suspiciously low. A good deal of the stock 
on the shelves in St. Paul Street consisted of wares 
that, at a forced sale, would hardly fetch one third 
of their cost. In truth, this old and honored house 
had been an empty shell, living on the reputation 
earned by its founder, Samuel Sawyer, as sterling a 
man of business as Montreal has ever known. I 
remember him as one day he slowly came down the 
steps, of the Bullion Bank, wrinkled and bowed, 
leaning heavily on his cane. He died that summer, 
more than eighty years of age. His sons kept the 
old name on their signboard as one of their best 
assets. One puzzling fact about the Sawyer fail- 
ure was that this very Bullion Bank, where the 
firm since it opened its doors had kept an account, 
wholly escaped loss when the great leather house 
came to grief. How had that come about? Why 
was it that among all the bankers and shippers, 
the manufacturers and wholesalers of this city, 
only Benjamin Buckley, manager of the Bullion 
Bank, had detected in the Sawyers tokens of fi- 
nancial distress in time to avoid disaster when they 
failed? 



60 SHADOWS BEFORE 

Now that everybody concerned in this query 
has passed to the land of shades, I feel free to tell 
what I know about this case. Nearly thirty years 
ago I crossed the Atlantic in the Allan liner Sar- 
matian, with Benjamin Buckley as a fellow-pas- 
senger. We had so tempestuous a voyage that 
one night a life-boat was blown from its davits 
into the sea. The next night, almost as rough, 
found Buckley and myself the only tenants of 
the smoking-room. We chatted, and as the old 
banker sipped his toddy he grew more and more 
confidential. Our talk drifted to mind-reading, 
and I told Buckley some of the exploits of Cum- 
berland, the mind-reader, at Nordheimer's Hall 
one evening. Said Buckley impatiently, "Mind- 
reading! Tut! No, my boy, it's all a matter of 
face-reading, of voice-reading, and perhaps in 
Cumberland's case, of muscle-reading, as he firmly 
holds your hand, and notes your unconscious 
twitches. Of course you remember the Sawyers' 
failure ten years ago or so ? " 

"Certainly I do, and how your bank lost noth- 
ing, for all that the firm had always kept an ac- 
count at your office." 

"Yes, and Samuel Sawyer was one of our prin- 
cipal directors for many years before his death. 
Our escape from a heavy loss when the Sawyers 
failed was due to what you may like to call mind- 
reading. May I tell you about it?" 



SHADOWS BEFORE 61 

"Please do so. I am all ears." 

"One cold night, early in January, I was walk- 
ing homeward along Dorchester Street when I 
overtook Philip Sawyer, who was always rather a 
slow chap. After we had wished one another a 
Happy New Year, we spoke about the proposal of 
the Ottawa Government to heighten the tariff on 
imported leather. Sawyer's comment was, 'It 
won't help us, even if the bill goes through. 
Nothing can do this country any good now. Why, 
when a man's note falls due he thinks he does well 
if he pays for the stamps on his renewal. I had 
just such a customer this morning.' In another 
moment we reached Guy Street. I bade Sawyer 
good-night, and continued my northward jaunt. 

"It was not so much what the man said, as his 
heart-broken tone and look that set me thinking. 
I had seen just such a look flit across a man's face 
when he felt himself at death's door. I had seen 
it once more when another man was facing in- 
solvency and disgrace. Nobody, let him suffer 
whatever stress he may, ever wears that beaten 
look while there's a glint of hope in his heart. As 
I walked along Guy Street to my house I began to 
put two and two together. It was the second week 
in January, and Philip Sawyer had probably just 
scanned his firm's profit and loss account for the 
past twelvemonth. If ever a face divulged a 
secret, Philip Sawyer's face that night told me that 



62 SHADOWS BEFORE 

his house had scored a large deficit as the result of 
its business in 1875. To that inference another 
tacked itself as I knocked the snow from my heels 
on my doorstep. All the three brothers in the firm 
occupied big mansions, far outvying the modest 
dwelling in Palace Street that had been good 
enough for their father. For a long time the 
treasury in St. Paul Street had maintained three 
extravagant households, as well as three country 
places on the Lower St. Lawrence. Was there 
anything else to trouble Philip Sawyer and give his 
cheek that tell-tale grayness, his tone that de- 
spairing quaver? Yes: within three years formid- 
able rivals had established themselves almost at 
his office-door. Rimmer & Rand, this new con- 
cern, had been the two best salesmen the Sawyers 
ever had in their employ. They were securing 
large orders in Ontario and the Northwest in com- 
petition with the old firm. And then there was 
the new tannery of Telfer & Tomkins on the La- 
chine Canal. Tomkins was a Yankee from Brock- 
ton, whose chemical kinks shortened the processes 
of tanning, and materially lowered their cost. 

"Next morning, without a word to anybody, I 
examined the Sawyer account at the bank. Its 
cash balance, barely a thousand dollars that day, 
had been slowly shrinking for three years or so. 
That was a bad sign. Other signs were worse. 
About one fourth of the firm's paper under dis- 



SHADOWS BEFORE 63 

count came from supply-accounts, that is from 
houses whose supplies came chiefly from the Saw- 
yers as their backers and nurses, who granted long 
credits. One of these concerns had no less than 
twenty thousand dollars of its paper in our hands. 
Think of that! And some of these notes I sus- 
pected to have been given as sheer accommodation, 
and stood for no real sale or genuine debt of any 
kind. I keenly felt that I had been remiss with 
the Sawyers, downright careless, indeed. The 
firm had been in business so long, it had bulked so 
largely in the trade of Montreal, that a belief in 
its solidity and wealth had overstayed all sound 
warrant. Not one of the sons of Samuel Sawyer 
had a tithe of his ability and force : that lacking the 
firm was slowly dying from dry rot. It was high 
time for me to get busy. That week Joseph Saw- 
yer, the youngest of the partners, who attended to 
the banking, called at my office for a discount as 
usual. His paper included a note signed by White 
& Whinstone of Toronto, a supply-account. I 
objected to this note, and told my customer that 
I wished some of this supply paper retired within 
the next three or four months. He was startled, 
and not quite civil. But my resolution was taken, 
and I never budged from it. I always spoke court- 
eously to Sawyer, but I told him distinctly that 
his line of discount must be steadily reduced. He 
was too cautious a man to ask me why ; perhaps he 



64 SHADOWS BEFORE 

was a mind-reader, too ! And so that year, under 
constant pressure, by throwing out every note I 
didn't want, I lowered the account about one half. 
The next year I continued that policy, and Joseph 
Sawyer was keen enough to see that I no longer 
cared for his business. All this while he had been 
taking paper to the Exchange Bank — most of it 
stuff that I had refused. These notes, when the 
Sawyers went up the spout, did not net the Ex- 
change Bank forty cents on the dollar. But the 
Bullion Bank, with its paper picked and sifted, 
collected in full every note discounted for the 
Sawyers. In not more than three or four cases 
had we to grant renewals. So much for a glance 
at a tell-tale phiz, so much for an ear to catch the 
wail in a man's tone. Depend upon it, there's 
the essence in mind-reading." 

"Yes, Mr. Buckley, and yet it all turns upon the 
tact and the will to take advantage of what that 
glance sees, and what that ear hears." 

"Mebbe," quoth the old chap, as he cast the butt 
of his cigar into the ash-tray, and ambled to the 
cabin-door on his way to bed. 



WHY JOEL JONES DIED POOR 



There is a generation that curseth their father. 

Proverbs xxx., ii. 



In the spring of 1880 a rounded corner in the 
heart of Montreal, facing the Champ de Mars, 
was torn down to make way for a modern building. 
For many years that corner had borne in huge 
gold letters, "Jones's Laundry Bar." That soap 
was so good that thousands of housekeepers used 
no other, and it made Joel Jones a rich man— as we 
counted riches in those distant days. Just how 
wealthy he was he kept to himself. He had no 
partner. His private ledger was written up, day 
by day, with his own pen, so that no confidential 
clerk could disclose to friends, of course in strict 
confidence, the net figure in the account headed 
Capital. But signs of Jones's financial ease were 
manifold. He always paid cash for supplies, even 
when he bought a carload of tallow. He set up 
costly new machinery as soon as he was sure that 
it would save him money. And rumor said that 
he was a lender on a large and profitable scale, 
s 65 



66 WHY JOEL JONES DIED POOR 

But here, as events plainly proved in good time, 
rumor was wrong. 

One winter morning, nearly forty years ago, the 
readers of the morning papers were told that Joel 
Jones had died of heart disease during the preced- 
ing night at the General Hospital. He had the 
respectful obituary and the decent funeral due to 
a man of his good standing in the community. 
But his competitors, his customers, and the gos- 
sips-at-large were struck dumb when, in about a 
fortnight, the Jones executors announced that the 
estate netted barely $12,000. How could that 
be? Had the old man in the later months of 
his wretched health been caught when Richelieu 
tumbled from 130 to 48 in a single week? Or was 
he short on Tuscorora when it bulged from 86 to 
512 in less than a month, through striking the 
richest lode in the record of Canadian silver- 
mining ? Had he deposits in savings banks as yet 
undiscovered? Had he forgotten to enter in his 
ledger loans to borrowers? No. So far as his 
ledger went it plainly set forth every debit and 
credit as carefully within a week of Jones's death 
as if he had been but thirty years of age instead of 
seventy-four. One fact, indeed, was singular, and 
gave rise to a good deal of guessing. The last 
ledger in Jones's safe, the only one that could be 
found, was but eighteen months old. Its neat 
pages showed that the business had rapidly 



WHY JOEL JONES DIED POOR 67 

dwindled toward the close of the old soapmaker's 
life, and yet it did not explain why he died a com- 
paratively poor man. That secret had been de- 
stroyed with his old records. His daughter, a 
woman of forty, and her three brothers, were 
deeply chagrined. They were convinced that 
their father had invested in Dominion securities — 
to be duly found in a safety-vault. He had daily 
scanned with interest the quotations of these secu- 
rities on 'Change. And yet when every safety- vault 
in Montreal was visited, in none of them had Joel 
Jones ever deposited anything whatever. Day by 
day the mystery darkened; everybody who dis- 
cussed the shrunken estate of Joel Jones was 
sorely puzzled, with one exception, namely, myself. 
Jones was a master of his trade as a soapmaker, 
and he was a pushful salesman. His laundry bar 
was the sound and quick cleanser that he said 
it was, and when he founded his factory he hit 
upon a capital plan for his prices. The more soap 
a customer bought, the less he paid per pound, so 
that if he bought all his soap from Jones he saved 
a good bit of money in the course of a year. This 
shrewd pricing built up Jones's fortune. His 
success began so early in his career, and it was so 
sturdily maintained, that his native sourness and 
rudeness had little or no curb. His harsh manner 
and rasping tongue forbade his having personal 
friends or cronies of any kind. His family life, 



68 WHY JOEL JONES DIED POOR 

report said, was one constant quarrel, for he was 
every whit as masterful at home as he was over his 
borax kettles. 

It was neither in a business way, nor in his house- 
hold, that I knew Joel Jones. He joined the Mon- 
treal Radical Club at our second meeting, and 
as its secretary I formed his acquaintance then 
and there. His interest in our aims of reform in 
politics and theology was sincere. Whenever a 
deficit had to be met he opened his pocketbook 
freely. Like many another man without a home, 
or with a home he shrinks from, Jones was an 
unfailing attendant at his club. No storm was 
severe enough to keep him away from our dingy 
rooms in St. James Street, and when a debate 
gave him a chance for hard hitting, his face would 
brighten with a zealot's fire. From the first, 
Jones took a liking to me. However sharply we 
differed in argument, he was never boorish to me, 
as he usually was to others of our little circle. 
Truth to tell, although Jones liked me, I disliked 
him. He was quite as dogmatic and assured as 
the orthodox folk he opposed. He was as positive 
that within his clutch lay final truth as if it had 
visibly descended to him from on high. He was 
one of the radicals who exchange an old parrot- 
cage for a new one ; who abandon Calvin, Wesley, or 
Mill, and take up with Paine or Ingersoll, Marx or 
Henry George, repeating their doctrines as self- 



WHY JOEL JONES DIED POOR 69 

evident and unrevisable. That known truth is, 
after all, but a fragment, to receive small additions 
even in a long life, was a conviction which Joel 
Jones scornfully repelled. First and last our 
Radical Club numbered at least one hundred mem- 
bers on its roll. I cannot recall more than three or 
four of them who passed from parrot-cages to the 
open air where truth is freely sought and fully 
enjoyed, no matter where it may be found. 

One afternoon in January the club had discussed, 
with no little heat, the legacy taxes then proposed 
by the Quebec Legislature. Jones walked be- 
side me, homeward bound, as darkness had fallen 
upon the city. A bleak, searching wind forbade 
conversation. As we crossed Victoria Square 
Jones said, "May I have a chat with you for 
five minutes just now about a personal affair? 
That talk about legacy duties has set me 
thinking." 

"Certainly, come to my quarters in Mansfield 
Street, where we'll be warm and comfortable out 
of this wind." 

When he doffed his mink cap, and brushed the 
snow from its old-fashioned peak, I saw that he 
had aged a year in the past month. His features 
wore the wan gray that marks a mortal ailment. 
He sighed wearily as he said, "I've had my eye on 
you at the club these five years past. I can trust 
you, I feel sure." 



70 WHY JOEL JONES DIED POOR 

" I thank you for your good opinion of me, Mr. 
Jones." 

"My health is bad, very bad, this winter, and 
at my age it behooves me to put my house in order. 

A forlorn look stole into the old man's face as he 
spoke, and I felt really sorry for him. He must 
be friendless indeed, I thought, when he seeks aid 
and comfort from a mere official acquaintance like 
myself. 

"I am a heart-broken man," he continued, "my 
four children at home in Metcalfe Street are noth- 
ing to me. Their mother was a Ledyard: she died 
two years ago, you may remember. She had a 
good deal of real estate, which went to her children, 
so that they are well off. But for all that they are 
eager for the day when they will divide my sticks 
of property — that I have wrought so hard to earn 
and guard. But I'll dodge them yet, and that's 
what I want to talk over with you. Mind this, 
all that we say here is strictly between us." 

"Absolutely, Mr. Jones." 

"Then let me tell you that before my marriage 
a daughter was born to me, and that she is the 
only child of mine I care a copper for. She is the 
wife of Ambrose Biggs of the East Shore Railroad, 
in Boston. She has always been kind and good to 
her old father. I gave her a high school education, 
and when she married her wedding present from 
me was a house furnished down to the napkin 



WHY JOEL JONES DIED POOR 71 

rings and salt cellars. She is to have as much of 
my property as I can give her, and the sooner the 
better, for I lose ground every day." As the old 
man ceased to speak his features grew sharper and 
he shivered as if from a sudden chill. 

"What property do you wish to transfer?" 

"Some city debentures, worth $42,000 at par, 
and eighty-five shares of Bank of Montreal stock. 
I have never owned any real estate, not even my 
dwelling-house." 

"Of course you desire to avoid your transfers 
being traced?" 

"They must not be traced, no matter how soon 
anything happens to me." 

I thought for a moment of leading brokers on 
'Change, and I said, "You might transfer your 
holdings piecemeal to Macdonald & Davidson, 
Scott & Gardner, Margin & Brothers, and Egerton 
Ford. They could buy, day by day, for Mrs. 
Biggs first-class securities listed in New York or 
Boston, paying dividends equal to those you re- 
ceive now." 

"Good! You have the right idea. Meet me 
at my factory at ten to-morrow and we can polish 
off the whole business by Saturday. You shall 
have five hundred dollars for your trouble." 

Before Saturday my program was duly carried 
out, and Mrs. Biggs was the registered owner of 
Boston municipal bonds, and of Western Union 



72 WHY JOEL JONES DIED POOR 

shares, yielding her a goodly income. As soon as 
the transactions were closed, the brokers' accounts 
were thrust into Jones's stove beside his desk. 
That stove, I am certain, devoured the old ledgers 
which recorded the holdings sold for Mrs. Biggs's 
benefit. 

Joel Jones lingered for nearly two years there- 
after, and at times his health improved so much 
that he hoped for prolonged life. But one bitterly 
cold night as he walked home he took a severe 
chill, and a violent cough aggravated the weakness 
of his heart. On the second evening of his stay at 
the General Hospital he died. For many a week 
after his death his heirs-at-law in Metcalfe Street 
sought a hoard which they were positive they 
would find. Their quest was vain, for no such 
hoard existed. Where the old father's heart was, 
there he had bestowed his possessions, and so 
shrewdly as to switch off all appeals to law. Thus 
it was that Joel Jones, long a rich man, died poor. 



SLIGHT REPAIRS 

Who, while her boys are fast asleep, 
A-down the stairs doth softly creep. 
Milk- jug to find, without a cheep? 
My mother! 

Who then the furnace-grate doth shake, 
And doth the peptic biscuit bake, 
Long ere another soul's awake? 
My mother! 

Who when her larder runneth low, 
Unto the market-stalls doth go, 
The mercuree at ten below? 
My mother! 

Who's there when wood's to be chopt up, 
Or beating rain's to be mopt up, 
Or kitchen-sink hath got stopt up? 
My mother! 

Who when folks talk doth show most wit; 
When frauds assail, discerns their pit; 
When trouble comes, displays most grit? 
My mother! 

On a winter night, fifteen months ago, Mrs. 
McTabb's family were sitting in the comfortable 
little parlor of a modest house in Gonzaga Street, 

73 



74 SLIGHT REPAIRS 

a respectable and unfashionable thoroughfare of 
Northern Montreal. Mrs. McTabb's household 
consisted of herself, two sons, and three daughters. 
The elder boy, Jack, earns good wages in a piano 
factory. The younger son, Tom, a lad as yet, is an 
amateur carpenter, with the ability to make the 
whole house untidy every day. The daughters 
are young women of good education, pleasant 
manners, and handsome faces of the Scottish type. 
They are girls like to marry early and happily. 

Jack and his mother were seated by themselves 
near the crackling grate fire, and their topic 
was that frequent theme, their landlord, and his 
intentions. 

"Miller is going to raise his rents in May, " said 
Mrs. McTabb, her tone indicating spirits close to 
zero. "He's hinted as much to the Millards next 
door — and it's such a bother and expense moving." 

"Yes," said Jack reflectively, "and where can 
we go and do better? All the talk in our shop is 
that rents will be ten per cent, higher in the spring, 
and living in the suburbs means paying your money 
in car-fare instead of in rent, with the luxury of 
strap-hanging most of the time." 

" I declare, " rejoined Mrs. McTabb, with wrath 
in her tone, "landlords are the meanest set on the 
face of the earth. Miller is charging us just twice 
what this place brought sixteen years ago, when it 
was new, and the Reeds lived here. Mrs. Munro 



SLIGHT REPAIRS 75 

told me only this morning, that Miller thinks of 
making a feed store next door. A nice thing to 
have bales of hay on our sidewalk, and a bunch of 
straw hung out as a sign beside our parlor window. 
We'll have to pay double insurance, and be burnt 
in our beds, too, may be. That old miser of a 
Miller has never done a thing to this house since 
we came here four years ago. Not a latch or a 
lock will he fix. We've had plastering to repair, 
and we've had to ease doors and window-sashes 
over and over again, just because they were miser- 
able green pine to begin with. When he raised 
the rent two years ago, the week after he saw our 
nice new paper on the parlor walls, I made up my 
mind that he'd never raise his rent on us again. 
Why should he? He's getting four profits on his 
money now. And me a widow, too." 

Mrs. McTabb's eyes moistened. 

"Well, mother, that is all very fine, but what 
can we do if property is rising all the time? We 
can't live in a smaller house. " 

"No, we can't possibly live in a smaller house. 
I would like to have a larger house, with a room in 
it for Tom, bigger and brighter than that dark 
closet of his upstairs." 

Just then the door-bell rang loudly, with the 
unmistakable pull of a postman. Mrs. McTabb 
went to the door and brought in a large blue-tinted 
official envelope. Brushing off the melting snow- 



76 SLIGHT REPAIRS 

flakes that clung to it, she drew out a sheet of legal 
cap, stiff and thick enough to print banknotes upon. 
It was a typewritten note from Hawk & McFac- 
tum, solicitors in St. James Street, notifying Mrs. 
McTabb that their clients, Willis & Son, intended 
to pay off her mortgage falling due first proximo, 
unless that for the term of the ensuing three years 
she consented to reduce her rate of interest from 
five-and-one-half per cent, to five per cent. 

"Jack, look at that!" she cried, as she handed 
the note to her son, who read it with a knitted 
brow. His mother's face took on a shade of 
deepened anxiety. Mrs. McTabb did not like 
her little bit of an income to be shorn by forty 
dollars a year, at one fell swoop, as it were. Her 
husband's life had been insured in the Sun Office 
for that amount, and when he died, about six 
years before, she had invested her money in a mort- 
gage, through Hawk & McFactum, who had been 
Mr. McTabb's solicitors. And . now, with so 
many new demands on her pittance of an income, 
it was to be reduced by forty dollars. While 
Jack was musing over the lawyers' note, she was 
totting up how much she could count on, month 
by month, including a little something from her 
Merchants' Bank shares, and the trifle received as 
interest from her account in the Savings Bank. 
Mrs. McTabb had never before felt so poor, so 
oppressed as a tenant by a ruthless landlord. A 



SLIGHT REPAIRS 77 

glance at Jack reminded her of his generous con- 
tribution to the household expenses, and strength- 
ened her wish that the demands upon his slim 
purse might not be increased. 

Jack seemed to be reading the type written lines 
in his hand. At last he broke out 

"Mother, let me tell you what you might do. 
Property is going up all the time, and these lawyers 
say that it is cheaper than ever to borrow on a good 
mortgage. Why not buy fifteen or sixteen thou- 
sand dollars' worth of property, pay half cash for 
it, and get Hawk & McFactum to borrow the other 
half for you at five per cent.? What's the use of 
paying rent all our lives, and having nothing to 
show for it ? " 

"I wouldn't like to owe anything on property, 
Jack. Why wouldn't it be best to buy no more 
than I can pay cash for?" 

"Because you will make a profit on the money 
you borrow. You see you pay only five per cent, 
for it, while you lease your houses so as to net seven 
or eight per cent., after the outlay for taxes, insur- 
ance, and repairs. " 

"But suppose that any of the houses couldn't be 
let?" 

" Small fear of that, mother, if you buy in a good 
locality, not too far from Dorchester Street. 
And then you have always the chance of your 
property rising in value, which puts money in your 



78 SLIGHT REPAIRS 

pocket you don't have to earn. That's what has 
made Miller a rich man, confound him!" 

As they pursued their dialogue, Mrs. McTabb's 
honest face lost its troubled expression, and the 
world, even including Hawk & McFactum, did 
not seem so bad after all. And Jack, as he un- 
folded his scheme for increasing his mother's 
income, grew excited. His ' plans, with every 
word that he spoke, took a deeper hold of his 
mind. 

Landlord Miller fulfilled Mrs. McTabb's ex- 
pectations. On February first, the legal date, he 
gave her formal notice of a rise of three dollars a 
month in her rent. Her reply was ready. She 
intended to quit his premises on May first. 

Mrs. McTabb had always lived in rented houses, 
and for years had longed to own her home. This 
longing she was now determined to gratify, thanks 
to her son's instigation. Sometimes with Lucy, 
sometimes with Jean, and even with Jessie, the 
youngest lassie of all, she talked of her project, 
and how, in detail, they would furnish and deck 
their new home when they moved in. Mrs. Mc- 
Tabb inspected at least a score of premises offered 
for sale, and visited almost as many real estate 
agencies down-town, as she prosecuted her in- 
quiries as to terms. There was a streak of fun in 
this Scottish dame, and it amused her to bring 
out the contrasts betwixt fact, as developed under 



SLIGHT REPAIRS 79 

her shiny spectacles, and the glowing fancy of real 
estate advertisements. "A central locality" 
proved to be an alley, but to be sure, near the 
general post-office. "Constructed by a leading 
builder" described a bulging brick wall in Mans- 
field Street, withheld from a tumble by conspicu- 
ous bolts at the ends of steel rods. "Modern in 
its every appointment ' ' brought the weary widow 
to a row, built less than five years before, plainly 
scamped in every joint of its bricks, in every square 
yard of its plastering. She never gave a second 
glance at premises adjoining livery stables or 
garages, railroad tracks, or smoky factory chim- 
neys, which she discovered as the staple "offer- 
ings" at the agencies. At last, as a reward for her 
patience, Mrs. McTabb came upon just what she 
wanted: four comparatively new, small brick 
houses in a row. She summoned her boys and 
girls to a family council, and the decision was 
unanimous that it would be ' ' great ' ' to buy that 
row in Sycamore Street. The houses were not new, 
but they were well built. One of them would 
answer as the family mansion, and in its garret 
Tom would have a sunny bedroom, and lots of 
space for his lathe and work-bench. Up there he 
would leave the remainder of the house undis- 
turbed. The price of the property, $16,000, was a 
close fit to the computations of Jack's pencil. 
Some repairs, however, needed attention at once. 



80 SLIGHT REPAIRS 

It was the "run down" condition of the row that 
made it so cheap. 

Hawk & McFactum were as good as their 
word. They found a lender willing to advance 
Mrs. McTabb the eight thousand dollars she re- 
quired. In the fourth week of April she became 
the owner of the Sycamore Street row, and 
moved into No. 53, with three southerly windows 
in its gable. 

Mrs. McTabb's gratification with her purchase 
was almost without alloy. She admired her deep 
back yards, dating back to the time when land was 
sold by the lot — for a few hundred dollars — not by 
the square foot, and even the square inch, as to- 
day. She observed to Jack, again and again, how 
near her houses were to two lines of tramway. 
Close by, and yet not too near, were excellent meat 
and fish markets, and a big grocery charging low 
prices on the "cash and carry plan." Not two 
blocks off stood a department store, not the big- 
gest in town, but just the place to get an odd spool 
of thread, or a bit of lining, needed in a hurry. 
Mrs. McTabb already felt the tickle of a land- 
lord's pride. 

The leases of two of her houses ran out in the 
following May. Mrs. McTabb felt that the rents 
were low, far too low, indeed. She inquired as to 
what other house-owners in that vicinity intended 
to do with regard to new leases. A house opposite 



SLIGHT REPAIRS 81 

hers, which had been bringing $25 a month, was to 
be advanced five dollars. A somewhat larger house, 
close by, was to pay an increase of eight dollars. 
This information aroused mingled feelings in 
Mrs. McTabb's heart: joy in her bargain in these 
houses ; sharp regret that one of her tenants had a 
lease for three years longer at the old rate. She 
made a mental note that she would never grant 
long leases. When Jack, at his mother's request, 
brought home from Lovell's two "House to let" 
placards, there was a long, earnest discussion as to 
what rents should be asked for the houses soon to 
be leased. 

"Mother," said Jack, "don't you think five 
dollars a month too much of a jump all at once? 
Isn't it taking advantage of people to make them 
pay sixty dollars more a year than the houses 
ever fetched before ? " 

"Jack, don't be silly like your poor, dear father 
before you. Take what you can get. Folks 
wouldn't pay thirty dollars if they could rent such 
a nice, handy house for less. Property is going 
up wonderfully in this neighborhood, and why 
shouldn't our rents rise as well as everybody 
else's?" 

The girls giggled. They hardly knew which side 
to take. They had been tenants so long that 
their dislike of high rents had not had time to for- 
sake them as yet. 



82 SLIGHT REPAIRS 

Next morning Jack suspended the placards, 
"House to let: $30 per month. Apply to No. 

53-" 

Within three days Mrs. McTabb had so many 
applicants that her views with regard to tenancy 
underwent still further development. She almost 
regretted her moderation in charging so small a 
figure as thirty dollars. As it was, she meant to 
pick and choose from among her inquirers. Two 
of these inquirers were wives of men employed 
on the Canadian Northern Line. Their visits re- 
minded Mrs. McTabb that this railroad was doing 
much for the prosperity of Montreal, an additional 
reason why rents should be stiffened, especially 
on so central a thoroughfare as hers, soon to have 
its name changed to Sycamore Avenue instead of 
Sycamore Street. Both the callers, whose hus- 
bands were railroad employees, had young chil- 
dren, and Mrs. McTabb hesitated about leasing 
her houses to them. She couldn't bear to have 
youngsters abrading her walls, and pulling her 
banisters and blinds to pieces. To be sure, Jack 
and Tom and the girls had been little once, but 
they had been so well trained and watched that 
they had never damaged any landlord's walls, or 
his banisters, or his blinds, or anything else that 
was his. 

Another caller was a refined, neatly dressed 
widow, from Quebec. Her manners were those of 



SLIGHT REPAIRS 83 

a lady in the best society, and her voice had the 
well-bred modulation which can be neither imi- 
tated nor taught. Her two young sons, she said, 
were clerks in the Wellington Insurance Office; 
she had one daughter, an invalid. Mrs. McTabb 
was sorry to say that other parties were wanting 
the house, that she had in part promised it to them, 
and would let the lady know her decision early 
next week. 

"When the lady bowed herself out, as might a 
dame of the time of Louis XIV., Mrs. McTabb 
said to Lucy, in a tone of meditation : 

" I don't want a widow in a house of mine who 
hasn't good private means. Suppose her sons 
die, or lose their places, or go to the States, what 
about me? I might have the house thrown on my 
hands in the fall, or the winter, maybe, just when 
tenants can't be found. No, the best people for 
my houses would be newly married couples. 
They'd furnish up nicely, and there'd be no chil- 
dren to knock things about — not for two or three 
years anyway. " 

And thus, by waiting less than a week, and 
selecting just what she desired, two newly wedded 
couples were secured, who were plainly climbing 
up the social ladder, not slowly descending that 
ladder, as in the case of the lady from Quebec, 
whom Lucy called "the Marchioness." 

Now for a word about our young mechanic, 



84 SLIGHT REPAIRS 

Tom, in the attic. He hugely enjoyed his ample 
quarters, and Jack took counsel with him as to 
how their new home might be bettered from cellar 
to roof. Jack estimated that four hundred dol- 
lars or so would make their home as modern, as 
convenient in every way, as if a builder were giv- 
ing it a few final wads of putty and dabs of paint. 
But when the boys began work in earnest they dis- 
covered that one repair demanded another, and 
that every improvement made other improvements 
quite indispensable. The first story floors had 
sagged somewhat, so that a brick wall across the 
basement had to remedy that downward bend. 
When the bricklayer came and tore up the base- 
ment floor to begin his work, there was such a 
revelation of damp, rotten wood that Jack was 
reluctantly obliged to take the bricklayer's advice 
and keep out both damp and rats by laying down 
a concrete floor. To lay this properly not only 
took a good while, it sorely deranged Mrs. Mc- 
Tabb's kitchen, and worst of all, it was costly. 
When the new floor was completed, every bit of 
the basement wall and ceiling asked to be replas- 
tered, and replastered it was. While thus going 
forward, slowly enough, the boss plasterer pointed 
out to Jack that the basement windows should^be 
enlarged. They were much smaller than those of 
new houses, and daylight was a good bit cheaper 
than gaslight. 



SLIGHT REPAIRS 85 

"Better make one job of it while you are at it, " 
he said. 

So, after some little discussion with his mother, 
Jack called in a stone-mason, and that week the 
stone courses which rose above the basement 
windows were knocked out for quite fourteen 
inches. The new windows made their rooms al- 
most gay as viewed from within. But viewed 
from outside the house front looked ragged and 
patchy. So next day painters were busy renewing 
the cream-colored paint on the whole row, from end 
to end. Jack, with a sense of proprietorship, and 
to see at close range how the work proceeded, 
mounted one morning a painter's ladder until he 
was abreast of the eaves. He noticed that the 
leader which carried off rain was half full of dust 
and dirt. In cleaning it out he brought to light 
a dozen holes in the metal, and as he cautiously 
examined the roof, he found it rusty in a good many 
breadths. These discoveries made Jack a trifle 
nervous. When he had promised his mother to 
put her house in order, he had no idea that any- 
thing beyond "slight repairs" would be needed. 
He was not then aware of the thorough neglect 
and unwholesomeness into which ordinary dwell- 
ings are allowed to lapse ; and he did not know that 
houses built to lease are often run up by specula- 
tors with no regard for the health or comfort of 
their occupants. 



86 SLIGHT REPAIRS 

However, Jack had courage, and he resolved to 
renew his mother's house from its ridge-pole to 
its drains. He had the leaders well soldered, and 
the roof repaired, when his sisters showed him one 
morning how the carpenter, in jacking up the back 
parlor floor, had started cracks in its plaster. Jack 
said at once: "Girls, I have a job for you. Wash 
the paper off the walls in both the front and back 
parlors, and we will have them neatly repaired and 
tinted. Tinting is more wholesome than paper, 
any day. And then I'll have neighbor Grimsdale 
fresco both ceilings at his leisure." There were 
other and harder steps in this pilgrim's progress. 
He had the plumbing inspected. It was found to 
be grossly defective. He had it renewed, with all 
its pipes left uncovered and accessible throughout 
their whole course. Winter in Montreal is long 
and severe. Jack installed a hot-water furnace, 
which served much better than the stoves it re- 
placed, while, at the same time, it warmed the 
water for the bath-room and the laundry. ' ' There 
won't be any more carrying coals upstairs, or 
bringing ashes downstairs. The fuel we'll save 
will more than pay interest on the outlay," he 
said. 

Tom, handy with his saws, planes, and chisels, 
built a coal-bin under the basement staircase 
facing the furnace-door. When it was finished, 
with a sliding front, it held six tons of anthracite 



SLIGHT REPAIRS 87 

for use in rough weather when trips to the coal- 
shed were out of the question. Tom built not 
only the coal-bin, but an array of ironing-boards, 
clothes-horses, and dough trays. He provided 
wardrobe fronts for the wall recesses in the bed- 
rooms. Moreover he framed at least a score of 
pictures that had been accumulating for years. 
They added much to the adornment of No. 53. 
Tom's mother was certain that he was an Edison 
over again. On what grounds did she base this 
declaration? That boy, with two chums who 
were apprentices at the Northern Electric shops 
in Notre Dame Street, brought wires into every 
room of his mother's house. Forthwith electric 
bulbs expelled gas-lamps; a tiny electric motor 
turned the washing-machine, the wringer, and its 
attached mangle. Another motor, still smaller, 
worked the sewing machine upstairs. Electric 
smoothing-irons sent to the junk pile the flat-irons 
which, many a time, had been taken from the 
stove just a moment too soon, to reveal that undue 
previousness by scorchings untold and unmend- 
able. At first the good mother regarded these 
new devices with something of alarm. One night, 
when the springs of an electric toaster gave out a 
spark or two, she bade Tom take " that thing" out 
of the house. But her fear gave place to joy as 
she saw how safely and pleasantly every task com- 
mitted to her new servant was dispatched, and 



88 SLIGHT REPAIRS 

how much drudgery is relieved or banished by 
the electrician's wand. 

Yes, good Mrs. McTabb is to-day quite other 
than the former Mrs. McTabb. A little room off 
the back parlor is her " office. " Here she keeps 
her accounts. In her ledger the entries for repairs 
to her tenants' houses are neither frequent nor 
large. Her views as to the duties of landlords 
have undergone a profound change in Sycamore 
Street. She cannot afford to pay away every 
dollar of her receipts to plumbers, carpenters, 
roofers, and other cormorants. Tenants are al- 
ways seeking expenditures on their houses. Only 
yesterday, she and Mr. Miller, once her landlord 
on Gonzaga Street, had a sympathetic chat as to 
the unceasing aggressions of tenants. There was 
a time, and not so long ago, when she disliked that 
man. But now it is much as if they had joined 
the same Masonic Lodge, so to say. He spoke 
words of comfort to her, "Thirty-three dollars a 
month for your houses will be little enough when 
the leases run out. North Montreal is out for 
progress let me tell you. " 

Sustained and soothed by this expectation, 
Mrs. McTabb muttered to herself, as the door 
closed behind Mr. Miller, "Thirty-three won't be 
so bad. ... Is han't pay a cent more for in- 
surance. . . . Slight repairs will do. " 



A LIFTED VEIL 

Sweet language will multiply friends: and a fair-spoken tongue 
will increase kind greetings. Ecclesiasticus vi., 5. 

"Oh, Samuel, my only darling, don't leave me!" 
It was a woman kneeling beside a bed, her head 
partly hidden by its coverlet, who screamed this 
appeal. I could not see her face, but her un- 
bound hair, streaked with gray, suggested her 
age as forty or thereabout. On a pillow almost 
covered by a dampened cloth, lay the panting 
face of my friend Sam Holt. At the head of 
the bed stood Dr. Crane, for years his physician, 
and mine. Close to the door, clad in a thick 
overcoat, with his hat and fur gloves in his hands, 
stood a man of middle-age, whom I had never seen 
before. He was strangely agitated, and seemed 
to be fastened to the spot against his will. Who 
was he? Who was that hysterical and moaning 
woman, with her face averted from everybody 
but Sam Holt? 

To answer these questions I must put back the 
clock a great many years and offer, first of all, a 
word of comparison. 

89 



90 A LIFTED VEIL 

Why is it, I wonder, that among all the diverse 
folk of North America the pleasantest are born 
and bred south of Mason and Dixon's line? Per- 
haps it was slavery that, in bestowing leisure 
upon slave-owners, enabled them to perfect graces 
of address, and affabilities of manner that in the 
bustling North are well-nigh unknown. Whatever 
the explanation may be I have found the most 
winning men of business in Canada to be natives 
of southern zones. And the best example of them 
all was Sam Holt, of Georgia, who came to Montreal 
at the close of the Civil War as agent of the Car- 
bondale Colliery of Pennsylvania. What a tem- 
perament that man had! Nothing ever ruffled 
him. A blizzard once delayed a train-load of his 
coal for two weeks. He simply borrowed all the 
anthracite he needed from a competitor, graciously 
lifting his hat. When January and February 
brought their customary advance in prices, he 
sugar-coated his levy with the comment, "O, 
well, there isn't much winter left now." 

Of course such a man became popular at once. 
Within a year his visiting list included the historic 
household that had entertained, in their mansion 
at Cote des Neiges, the last Intendant of France. 
I suspect that sympathy with Sam as a Southerner 
opened the door of more than one Sher- 
brooke Street homestead, usually as exclusive. 
Other hosts he had, of quite other quality, in two 



A LIFTED VEIL 91 

or three men who had grown suddenly rich as 
railroad-builders, and who took up Sam with both 
hands. These millionaires always invited him 
when they went salmon-fishing, or sought the 
elusive ouananiche in Lake St. John. On one of 
these jaunts to the Saguenay, Sam told us of his 
hairbreadth 'scapes as a blockade-runner and a 
spy. Twice he had dined with General Robert E. 
Lee, whom he regarded as the noblest spirit of the 
Civil War. Once, he and two of his chums, in 
the heat of an August day, strayed into a Northern 
camp, wearing so little uniform that they were 
unnoticed and unmolested. Toward the close 
of the war he had entered Washington disguised 
as a peddler. One morning, on Pennsylvania 
Avenue, he overtook President Lincoln, out for a 
stroll, and calmly offered him a pair of suspenders. 
Why wasn't Sam an actor, or, better still, a politi- 
cian ? Whether he spoke to a Judge of the Superior 
Court or to a shoe-black he was equally courteous 
and kind. He was gold outside because he was 
gold all through. 

When Sam came to Montreal he took a room 
at the Franklin Hotel, and there he remained. 
It was handy to his office, he said, and though the 
house was not stylish, it was comfortable. Sam 
was far and away the best-liked man in the house. 
Phil Carson himself, the portly landlord, received 
no such alert and indulgent attention as Sam was 



92 A LIFTED VEIL 

accorded by every servant under the roof. In 
fact Sam was too well liked by everybody. A 
large subtraction from his popularity would have 
inured to his advantage. As the years succeeded 
each other it was manifest that he had fallen into 
the pit which entraps so many good fellows. He 
grew rotund in person, tardy of step, and, in his 
own phrase, his complexion was not painted in 
water colors any more. But his charm of manner 
was heightened, rather than otherwise, by a certain 
slowness that settled down upon him. 

Early one morning, shortly after New Year's 
Day, I was abruptly summoned to Sam's room, 
near my own quarters, by a hallboy. Thither 
I sped, scantily attired. 

When the door was firmly closed, Sam, between 
sobs and moans, told me a heart-breaking story. 
For years, and long before he came North, he had 
been a poker-player, and within the last twelve 
months he had lost heavily. In a few hours he 
expected a visit from the chief auditor of the 
Carbondale Colliery, who would discover a short- 
age of $1200 in Sam's accounts. Rather than 
face exposure, he had shot himself. But his un- 
steady hand had missed his heart, and inflicted 
a wound not at once fatal. Never did I find his 
brain clearer than as he then pleaded with his 
Maker to spare his life, that he might repay 
his trusting employers. But Dr. Crane, hastily 



A LIFTED VEIL 93 

summoned, when he examined Sam's wound, de- 
clared that he had only three or four days to live. 
Palliatives of his pain were administered, and two 
nurses, with all dispatch, were engaged. About 
noon that day the dreaded auditor arrived from 
Philadelphia. He proved to be a man who 
might worthily hold the helm of his great mining 
company. 

"Why, Sam, " he expostulated, "why didn't you 
tell us all about this wretched business? Do you 
suppose that twelve thousand dollars would not 
have been forthcoming, instead of twelve hundred, 
if we had known your plight? There isn't a man 
on our staff, north or south, we regard as we 
regard you. We feel a great deal more than 
esteem for you, Sam — we feel affection." 

But regrets and prayers were unavailing. Sam 
took a sharp turn for the worse, when the doctor 
said that, if Sam wished, I might bring him a 
clergyman. Sam nodded assent. I posted at 
once to St. John's Rectory, close by, where the 
Rev. Edmund Wood promised to call at the Frank- 
lin within ten minutes at farthest. It was to 
report this sacramental visitation that I had come 
upon the kneeling woman as she sobbed at Sam's 
bedside. 

That dreadful scene was enacted on the third 
morning after Sam's attempt on his life. With 
swift pace a sleigh had driven to the hotel 



94 A LIFTED VEIL 

door. Instantly a man of middle age had 
alighted, accompanied by a lady closely wrapped in 
furs. As they swept into the hotel office the man 
in an excited key asked, " Is Mr. Samuel Holt any 
better? We heard yesterday in New York that 
he is dangerously ill." 

Landlord Carson, in charge of the register that 
morning, said, "Mr. Holt is sinking fast, I'm 
afraid, sir." Turning to a hallboy, he added, 
"Show the lady and gentleman to the parlor, 
and take their cards to room 89." 

But the pair insisted on being ushered immedi- 
ately to room 89. When the nurse, in response 
to a loud rap, said, "Come in," Sam's visitors 
burst into his presence, just a moment before my 
own entrance. Whoever she was, the shock of 
this lady's appeal had the effect of a blow on the 
dying man. He strove to speak and could not. 
He lifted his hands in a struggle for breath— and 
sank to rest forever. When Father Wood came in, 
punctually enough, all was over, and nothing 
remained but to request his services for Sam's 
funeral, two days thereafter. 

And who was this lady whose passionate words 
rang poor Sam's death knell? 

She was the wife of Abner Kittredge, who 
accompanied her, a cotton factor of Atlanta, in 
a large way of business. Sam Holt, as a youth 
of twenty, had been engaged to her. They had 



A LIFTED VEIL 95 

quarreled; she had broken off the match, and 
before her pique had cooled became the bride of 
Abner Kittredge. But her heart remained with 
Sam Holt through all the intervening years of her 
life, and she bitterly upbraided herself for provok- 
ing their quarrel. As Holt's coffin was borne to 
Mount Royal, those of us who had known him 
longest and best wept without restraint. In the 
second sleigh of our sad procession was the little 
gray-haired lady from Georgia. Just as we came 
to the portal of the cemetery, and its bell clanged 
a grim salutation, she lifted her veil for a moment. 
Her eyes were dry : they spoke despair. 



LEGIBLE LIPS 

Moving his lips he bringeth evil to pass. Proverbs xvi., 30. 

This morning, at the Merchants' Bank, I 
cashed my annuity check for an amount which, 
though modest, assures me comfort now that 
active toil is beyond my strength. This income 
fell to my lot through reading a man's lips without 
his knowledge. Let me tell you how it happened. 

Late in the nineties, one winter night, I took 
the express for Montreal at Toronto. As I sat 
at my window, waiting for the signal of departure, 
I noticed two elderly men pacing the platform, 
close to my elbow, absorbed in a confidential chat. 
Both were of more than middle stature, and one 
of them, clad in gray tweed, was more than six 
feet in height. He had a face of power and deci- 
sion ; his look was that of a man who gets what he 
wants. In the full beam of an arc-lamp he said 
emphatically to his companion, "Too bad that 
the Waverley lode should give out so soon." 

With two panes of stout glass encasing me from 
the speaker, with the din of shunting trains and 

96 



LEGIBLE LIPS 97 

swift baggage trucks filling the air, how did I know 
what he said? Simply because my old friend 
and neighbor, Albert Brooks, whose wife is a 
deaf-mute, long ago taught me to read lips almost 
as readily as print. I have always been a trifle 
hard of hearing, and this has spurred my diligence 
as a lip-reader. What aided me that night was 
that this tall and austere speaker was as smooth 
shaven as if a razor had just left his face. And be- 
sides, the uproar of the station obliged him to give 
every syllable the clearest possible enunciation. 
Just before the final "all aboard," this utterer 
of words that I had overseen, rather than over- 
heard, entered my Pullman and took a seat near 
mine. He was evidently moody and perturbed 
as he scanned a time-table and asked the con- 
ductor, in a querulous tone, if the night expresses 
were arriving in Montreal on time that winter. 
To the answer, " 'Most always, sir," he responded 
with a surly grunt. Without doubt this man 
was somebody; probably a lawyer of mark, with 
his eye on a chair in the Dominion Senate ; possibly 
a thriving engineer. Whatever his rung on the 
ladder of life, he was ill-tempered and could afford 
to show it. 

Punctually our train reached Montreal, and the 
man in gray was off with his bag in a twinkling. 
About a week afterward I was crossing Place 
d'Armes with my brother-in-law, John Davis, a 



98 LEGIBLE LIPS 

Montreal solicitor, when he touched his hat to a 
passer-by, with "Good-morning, Mr. Brink." 

Mr. Brink politely returned the salute. He 
was my fellow-passenger in the train from Toronto, 
and I remarked that his face was distinctly more 
care-worn than when we had journeyed together a 
few days before. To my query, "Who is that?" 
Davis replied, "That is Joshua Brink of Cataraqui, 
who has netted a million in mining, people say. 
He is chief owner of the Brierly Mines on Lake 
Superior. Of course you've heard of its wonderful 
Waverley lode, the richest ever struck in Cata- 



raqui 



"The Waverley lode?" I muttered. 

"Yes," repeated Davis, "the Waverley lode, 
you must have heard about it." 

"Yes, I have heard about it," I said, as the 
words spoken by Joshua Brink in the Toronto 
station surged into my memory. Then I added, 
"Don't rich lodes, such as the Waverley, some- 
times peter out?" 

"To be sure they do, sometimes, but this 
particular lode never yielded more and better 
ore than now, according to the report read at our 
annual meeting less than two hours ago, in the 
hearing of Brink, and the rest of us. Why our 
dividend has been two per cent, a month for 
nearly three years, and the stock is at 380." 

"Have you many shares?" I inquired. 



LEGIBLE LIPS 99 

"Only fifty. I wish I had fifty times fifty. 
There is Peter McAlpin, one of our wealthiest 
men, who is treating with Brink for a controlling 
interest. Brink asks 400, and McAlpin is parley- 
ing." 

"Do you know McAlpin?" 

" Intimately. I've been his solicitor for twenty 
years, since he was a comparatively poor man. 
My counsel has served him gainfully more than 
once." 

"Yes, John, and your counsel can now save 
him for a heavy loss. Let me have a few minutes 
with you at your office, and I will explain." 

We were soon ensconced in his small sanctum, 
lined to the ceiling with legal tomes bound in 
sheepskin, with document-boxes bearing dingy 
labels. The door duly closed, I recounted what 
Brink had said to his companion in the Toronto 
station a week before, "Too bad that the Waverley 
lode should give out just now." 

As a rule John Davis is a cool customer, but 
this was an occasion when he broke a rule and 
blurted out, "The d — ■ — ■ scoundrel! That's why 
Buzzard, whom I suspect to be his broker, has 
been selling Brierly shares so fast this week. A 
wholesale unloading on Peter McAlpin would be 
nothing less than grand larceny. What sort of 
man was it that Brink spoke to in the Union 
Station?" 



ioo LEGIBLE LIPS 

"A man not quite so old as himself, not so tall, 
somewhat stout in build, — the make of man who 
often brushes crumbs off his vest. There was 
something of a Yankee in the cut of his jib." 

"That was Tallaby, a Boston man, on the 
committee of the St. Botolph Club, and the chief 
engineer of the Brierly Mines." 

"What's to he done?" I queried. 

"Why, raise McAlpin's office on the phone at 
once, and tell him, as soon as we can, about this 
infernal rascality." 

McAlpin's office told us that Mr. McAlpin 
was expected about three o'clock. At that hour 
Davis and I were in his anteroom, and shortly 
afterward he came in. He was a forceful man, 
shaggy and rubicund, whose success as a railroad 
contractor had laid no varnish on his manners. 
In short meter I told my story. McAlpin red- 
dened with fury. Clenching his teeth he said, 
"You have come in the nick of time. This very 
morning I was on the point of closing with Brink 
for control at 390. He declared that the stock 
would be at 500 within six months." 

"Mr. McAlpin," asked Davis, "is there anyone 
at the Mines to inform you confidentially whether 
the Waverley lode has utterly given out or not?" 

After a moment's thought, McAlpin said, "Yes, 
Walter Murray, a junior engineer under Tallaby, is 
a kinsman of my wife's, and he has often stayed 



LEGIBLE LIPS 101 

at our house. I can depend upon his finding out 
the truth and telling me." 

His confidence was worthily placed. In four 
or five days Murray informed McAlpin that for 
at least a fortnight the Waverley lode had yielded 
only barren rock. Shafts had been driven in 
every direction of the slightest promise, with only 
failure thus far. 

Without giving a reason, McAlpin abruptly 
broke off his negotiation with Brink, who must 
have been sorely puzzled and chagrined at just 
missing a handsome profit on his Brierly stock. 
Brink, had he been charged with an attempt to 
defraud, could have pleaded that the annual re- 
port which stated that the Waverley lode was still 
rich in its output, was dated December 3 1st. That 
report was read on February 4th, and it was dur- 
ing the intervening five weeks that the Waverley 
lode had suddenly pinched out in worthless quartz. 
And then, who could be sure that a new shaft 
might not uncover a further stretch of the marvel- 
ous Waverley vein? All such hopes were doomed 
to disappointment. Last Monday twenty-five 
shares of Brierly stock were sold at 68, for its divi- 
dend has long stood at only one per cent, per 
quarter. And what of Joshua Brink? Six years 
ago he undertook a real estate speculation on a 
gigantic scale near Winnipeg. Severely pressed 
for cash he discounted forged promissory notes 



102 LEGIBLE LIPS 

at the Bullion Bank, a crime which sent him to the 
Kingston penitentiary. There, with lies of excul- 
pation on his lips, he died two years ago. 

Yet it was not lies, but truth, that he spoke 
that memorable winter night beside the railroad 
tracks in Toronto. And his words proved to be a 
godsend to me. Peter McAlpin was a man to 
requite a service such as mine, and generously. 
He was a director in the St. Lawrence Trust & 
Loan Company, of which he was a founder. Long 
before its office was opened for business, I was 
chosen as secretary. This post increased my 
income by two thousand a year. That surplus, 
invested with caution, and what is more, with 
good luck, bought me a decent annuity last June 
when I resigned my desk at seventy years of age. 
It was my friend Charley Johnson who put me 
up to buying that annuity. Said he, "That's the 
only investment going that hands a premium to 
old age. The older you are, the more you get." 



A GOLDEN SILENCE 

If thou hast heard a word let it die with thee; and be bold, it 
will not burst thee. Ecclesiasticus xix., 10. 

I held my tongue, and spake nothing: I kept silence, yea, 
even from good words; but it was pain and grief to me. Psalter 
xxxix., 3. 

"Thirty — thirty-five — forty — three hundred 
and forty dollars," muttered John Blake, as 
he finished counting a packet of banknotes. 
Then he took up for a final glance the letter to 
accompany this cash. The den in which he sat, 
built beneath a staircase, was dingy even at noon ; 
to-day, with an overcast sky, he had to work by 
gaslight. His desk, small and heavily littered 
with invoices and price-lists, commanded a view 
of one of the largest warehouses in Montreal. 
Without moving from his seat he could look forth 
upon the St. Lawrence with its winter roads to 
St. Lambert and Longueuil marked with boughs 
of pine and hemlock. At that time, early in the 
sixties, flour was mounting rapidly in price, and 
his handsome profits gave him a glow of heart he 
was sedulous to conceal. Just as he began to 
address an envelope to the shippers of barley in 

.103 



104 A GOLDEN SILENCE 

Three Rivers, who were to receive the $340, his 
door was abruptly opened. 

"Blake, how are you? I want some flour to- 
day. What's the price for twenty-five barrels 
superfine?" 

It was a hatchet-faced man, keen of eye, gray of 
beard, and buttoned to the chin in a chafed buffalo 
coat, who put the question. 

"Good-morning, Jackson, sit down." 

Thrusting beneath the letter he had just signed, 
the cash to go with it, he continued: "Flour's 
flour these days ; and what with war in the States, 
and a short crop in England, the demand is brisk. 
Eight-and-a-half a barrel is the best I can do." 

"Why eight was the price a fortnight back, 
and too high at that." 

"I know it, but I'm thinking that nine'll be the 
figure before the month is out. Jackson, I like 
your trade, but take less than twenty-five barrels 
if you can." 

"Mr. Blake, " interrupted an aproned salesman, 
"that sugar from Redpath's is at the gate; where 
shall I put it? There's no more room in the back 
store." 

"Excuse me, Jackson, for a moment. Keep 
your chair. Here's The Gazette." 

To bestow the sugar required a shifting hither 
and thither of a broad stack of boxes and bags, 
so that it was quite ten minutes before John 



A GOLDEN SILENCE 105 

Blake came back to his desk; it was to find his 
customer at the street door gazing at the threaten- 
ing sky. 

"Well," said Jackson, "with his hand on the 
latch, I'll close with you at eight-and-a-half, 
only you must give me thirty days instead of 
fifteen." 

"All right, then, seeing it's you, thirty it is." 

Drawing his mink cap over his ears, as if he 
expected snow, Jackson stepped into his sleigh, 
and in another instant was off. He was a trader 
at Lachine who, every week or so, came into the 
city for supplies. John Blake, following his rule, 
went to a sales desk and jotted down a note of 
Jackson's purchase, adding that the flour was to 
be shipped at once. This entry dispatched, he 
returned to his task of sending the remittance to 
Three Rivers. Lifting up the letter on his desk, 
the money it had covered was gone! Who could 
have taken it? Not Jackson surely, he was close- 
fisted and greedy of gain, — but a thief, no! He 
had never been accused of that. And then 
Jackson had remained in the office only part of the 
time he himself had been absent from it. Had 
anyone else crossed its threshold? he asked, in 
turn, every one of his hands. "No, sir," said 
they all. To his cashier's query, ' ' Are you missing 
anything?" he did not reply. 

"Perhaps," he thought, "I did not leave the 



106 A GOLDEN SILENCE 

bank bills under my letter after all. I may have 
thrust them into one of my pockets, or locked 
them up in the safe, whence I took them." 

Unavailing search but strengthened his recollec- 
tion of placing the cash under his letter and no- 
where else. At the close of the day's business, 
just before the shutters were fastened, he said to 
his cashier in a casual tone, "Charge my account 
with that $340 I meant to remit to Lalonde & 
Beauchamp. I'll send them their money on 
Saturday, maybe." 

As John Blake day by day revolved his loss in 
his mind, he became convinced that Jackson 
was the thief. No clerk or salesman showed any 
sign of extravagance, dissipation, or negligence 
in duty to betray money dishonestly come by. 
What gave certainty to his suspicion was that no 
second theft took place, as would, in all likelihood, 
have been the case had his warehouse harbored a 
thief. Yet it would be utter folly to accuse Jack- 
son against whom he had no tittle of evidence. 
A charge of theft, unsupported by ample proof, 
would entail a suit for criminal libel, with heavy 
damages to he added to the cash already gone. 
Then, too, he would lose Jackson's custom, and 
that was worth keeping, for all that he was 
an uncommonly close buyer. And whose fault 
was it that the missing cash had been left on 
his desk in so tempting a way? It was his 



A GOLDEN SILENCE 107 

first carelessness of the kind, and it would be the 
last. 

Four years passed. Jackson continued to buy 
at Blake's, much as had been his wont for many 
years before. Every week or so, when Blake and 
Jackson met, there was no seeming change in 
their customary, offhand cordiality. One winter 
morning, with just such an overcast sky, with a 
threat of snow in it, as on the day of the theft, 
Jackson dropped into Blake's stuffy little den, — 
this time to buy ten bags of Java coffee. The 
terms concluded, something in the flare of the gas- 
jet, something in the muffled rattle of the double- 
window presaging a snowstorm, revived in Jack- 
son's memory impressions often recalled and as 
often suppressed. Leaning forward cautiously, he 
whispered: "By the way, Blake, did you ever 
find out who stole that money from you here 
four winters ago ? ' ' 

"Yes, you stole it!" 

"I stole it! What do you mean, sir?" shouted 
Jackson, with a nervous tremor in his tone. "Tom 
Jackson a thief! Are you a madman?" 

"Well, I don't think I'm a lunatic quite, only 
this: I never told anybody I lost that money. 
How could you know about it unless you took 
it?" 

In a few moments John Blake computed how 
much the sum of $340 is increased by six per 



io8 A GOLDEN SILENCE 

cent, compound interest in four years. A check 
for this amount cashed that day by the City Bank 
displayed a signature so shaky that the teller 
with difficulty read it as "Thomas Jackson." 



AS OTHERS SEE US 

In the multitude of counsellors there is safety. 

Proverbs xi., 14. 

Above my desk, as I write, are two memorials 
that often carry me back to my student days 
at Frontenac College, in the quiet little city 
which was once the capital of Canada. One of 
these memorials of old times in Kingston is a 
silver cup that I won as a leader in the canoe race 
of '66. It is now, I am sorry to say, so sadly 
tarnished that its inscription is almost illegible. 
The cup, too, seems not only to have lost its 
beauty, but to have shrunk in its dimensions since 
the proud day I received it among the ringing 
cheers of well-nigh half the population of Kingston. 
Near its little bracket hangs another reminder of 
Frontenac, a picture of six students of the class of 
'67, my five chums, and myself. We six took part 
once in a somewhat unusual adventure, and it 
recurs to me as I glance at that photograph, 
dimmed as it is by the passing years. 

In the days when Dr. Marshall was principal, 
as indeed is the case to-day, most of the bovs came 

109 



no AS OTHERS SEE US 

to Frontenac from a distance, and it was usual 
for a good many of them to reside at the profes- 
sors' houses. My chums and I lived at the home 
of Professor Macdonald, whose chair at college was 
that of Latin and Greek. He was a polite and 
considerate host, but he had a reserve of manner 
which forbade anything like friendship with him. 
A bachelor brother of his, Duncan, an accountant 
in the Ontario Bank, was a member of the house- 
hold. So warm-hearted and affable was he that 
all six of us Frontenac men came to regard 
him as one of ourselves. We students had a 
little back parlor, overlooking Lake Ontario, for 
our club-room, as it were. From its windows 
at night we would often watch the steamers, 
as with their bright lamps of green, red, or blue, 
they glided past the city. Here when Legendre, 
Lyell, and Caesar were closed for the day, we 
usually had a chat together before we went to 
bed. Nobody was more welcome there, or took a 
livelier part in our discussions, than Duncan, or 
Mac, as we preferred to call him. One evening 
during our last spring term at Frontenac, three or 
four of us were in the little parlor chatting, when 
Louis Leclair broke in : 

"Say, boys, Sam Evans went home on the four 
o'clock train, and Dr. Marshall thinks he isn't 
coming back. He goes to England next week 
with his father." 



AS OTHERS SEE US in 

No one felt regret at this piece of news. Sam 
was not an agreeable chap. The first one to 
say so was Ben Murray : 

"Well, he isn't much loss — such a conceited, 
selfish hound ! " 

"Yes, but what a memory he's got. He was 
sixty marks ahead of the next man in history 
last year, " said Ned Taylor. 

"So he was," quickly remarked Charlie Ash- 
field, "but did you ever notice that he could 
always work his algebra best when he knew the 
answers?" 

"And what a sweet voice he has," observed 
Will Blanchard, "just as if his mouth were half 
full of porridge all the time, and aren't his clothes 
fine? I guess rich Papa Evans gets 'em ready 
made, with no allowance for growing." And 
Will strutted along the carpet with mimic pom- 
posity, his jacket much bulged, creased, and 
shortened, while he gave a mock recitation with 
much of Sam's encumbered utterance. Strut and 
tones were greeted with loud merriment, in the 
midst of which we noticed Duncan Macdonald 
in a corner of the room, with no concurrence in 
his eye. 

I can see him now — his Scottish face large of 
feature, and rather severe in cast, yet easily taking 
on an expression of the utmost kindliness. He 
had emigrated from Scotland several years later 



112 AS OTHERS SEE US 

than his brother, the professor, and the deliberate 
accent of Morayshire clung to his lips. I have 
never known a more sensible man than he, nor a 
more impartial mind than his. How exasperating 
that impartiality could be, when we wish to coax 
him into a verdict not quite just ! After a glance 
around the room, which presaged rebuke, Mac said : 

"Well, young gentlemen, are ye done picking 
Samuel Evans to pieces? I don't imagine that 
he can feel much sorrow in leaving Kingston folk 
behind him. The boy's sharp, and sometimes 
sharper than need be, but he has good parts ; he's 
hard working and ambeetious. Good and other- 
wise he's as he was made, and that's true of us all. 
Burns thought it would be a fine gift to see our- 
selves as ithers see us. Perhaps Samuel might 
have something to say about us that wouldn't be 
pleasant to hear." With that, and a "Good- 
night, " after a brief silence, Duncan left us. 

None of us relished what he had said. Will 
Blanchard was the first to speak. 

"What a queer notion that was that Mac 
handed out from Burns, 'see ourselves as ithers 
see us.' Last Sunday I heard him say to Dr. 
Marshall that a man may often tell more about 
another man after an hour's acquaintance than 
t' other fellow knows about himself in a lifetime. 
Tell you, boys: an idea strikes me." 

Will was always having ideas strike him. 



AS OTHERS SEE US 113 

"Suppose that each of us tells the rest right 
out what he thinks of them — but we must all 
promise not to take offense." 

" Yes, but some of us will take offense, and rap 
back good and hard when it's our turn to make 
remarks, " said Charlie Ashfield. 

"Still, we are all chums, so that we can't have 
a very bad opinion of each other, ' ' said Louis 
Leclair. 

"That's so," chimed in Ben Murray, "who 
knows what golden talents are hidden in some of 
us, all unsuspected, awaiting discovery by dis- 
cerning friends?" 

The more the idea was talked over, the more 
it grew in favor. To see one's self reflected in 
another's observation aroused strong curiosity all 
round, much as an Indian of long ago might seek 
to behold himself for the first time in a mirror. 
Next night, at our usual gathering in the back 
parlor, the topic that Mac had unwittingly sug- 
gested, came up again. Will Blanchard proposed 
that instead of speaking out our opinions, we 
should jot them down, each man noting what he 
deemed the strong and weak points of each other 
man, and what career he believed him best suited 
for. 

"And we must," he added, "take care to give 
one another as little pain as we can." 

Just when the comments on Will's proposal 



ii 4 AS OTHERS SEE US 

were at their noisiest, Mac came in. We told 
him how his line from Burns had borne fruit in 
Will's mind, and what we meant to do. He 
listened gravely, and said, after a considerable 
pause : 

"I think it's a verra gude idea of yours, Master 
William, but some of ye will be sure to be annoyed 
if it's carried oot. Mind, truth's not always 
sweet, and none the sweeter for a friend's speaking 
it. There'll be as little offense as may be if there's 
no certain knowledge as to who writes what. 
Perhaps I can help ye in that. Ye can trust me, 
I think, with the documents. I can transcribe 
on a bit of paper all that is said aboot each of 
ye, and then cast the oreeginals in the fire. Mind 
and take your time to say what ye have to say, 
and the briefer the better. Thursday after next 
the Easter holidays begin, and as ye leave for 
home I can give every man his papers for him to 
read at his leisure. Now be sure that none of ye 
use tell-tale words or phrases, or allude to anything 
to show who the writer is. 

We received all this with acclaim. We were 
glad that Mac thought enough of Will's project 
to aid him in carrying it out. We knew that he 
was the soul of honor, so that we might trust 
him implicitly with the "documents, " as he called 
them. 

A few days later, when I sat down, after a good 



AS OTHERS SEE US 115 

deal of reflection, to set forth in cold blood what 
I thought of my chums, I half repented agree- 
ing to Will's scheme. And yet why should our 
"documents" do us any harm? Did our fathers 
and mothers at home, our professors at Frontenac, 
know us as we knew each other? Who else had 
heard us say what we really wished to be, and 
had our insight as to how wishes were likely to be 
realized or disappointed by capacity lacking, or 
disposition faulty? Who else saw character and 
temper unrepressed and undisguised, or knew how 
our fairly equal advances in study meant very 
unequal exertions? Wouldn't there be, after all, 
a wholesome quality in the criticism of intimate 
friends who accorded one the privilege of like 
useful candor? — especially when all of us spoke 
under a shield which concealed identity? 

To begin with, then, there was Will Blanchard 
himself. He was an eager, restless kind of a chap, 
interested in everything, ever taking up some 
new hobby — botany, or a reading course in biog- 
raphy, or drawing, only to drop it soon for 
another hobby newer still. To him I wrote: 

"You have lots of ability, only don't scatter 
so much. Make up your mind to some definite 
career, and work at nothing else." 

Louis Leclair next came to my mind. A gay, 
breezy young Frenchman from Hochelaga, with 
vitality so abounding that breathing common air 



Ii6 AS OTHERS SEE US 

was a joy to him. To Louis this world was not a 
scene of duty, it was a thing to be feasted upon. 
When first he came to Frontenac his mind was 
an unplanted garden, for his schooling had been 
slight and shallow, so that Louis had over-much 
admiration for men with distinctly less native 
ability than himself, but with memories well 
stored and trained. Louis had a Frenchman's 
love of praise, but he would rather hear about his 
proficiency in mathematics and his skill as an 
oarsman, which really were but moderate, than 
his fine talents as a sketcher and his deftness 
with Mac's saws, chisels, and planes. To Louis 
I wrote : 

"You have more ability than you think, partic- 
ularly in handicraft, and in art. Why take a 
second place when you deserve a first? Try to be 
less impressible, and don't admire so very readily. ' ' 

Third came Ben Murray, the son of a rail- 
road contractor in Buffalo. Ben was kind-hearted, 
and looked it. His prepossessing face and lively 
temperament made him friends at first acquaint- 
ance. His father intended him to be a lawyer, 
but Ben's verbal memory was a sieve, and his 
progress at college was laborious. I had once 
heard an uncle of his, who lived in Kingston, say 
that Ben's father had built up a large business by 
his ability to handle men. I thought that Ben 
had the same power. While he was a universal 



AS OTHERS SEE US 117 

favorite at Frontenac, whenever differences of 
opinion arose in the class, he always managed to 
have his own way. So to Ben I wrote: 

"Think you ought to be a contractor or em- 
ployer of some kind, on a big scale, not a lawyer. 
That will give better play to your tact and pleas- 
antness." 

Law made me think of Charlie Ashfield, whose 
father was a lawyer in Belleville. Charlie was 
our best talker, and was always put forward when 
the class or the college needed a spokesman; just 
as I used to be when an excursion or a club supper, 
or other business affair was to be arranged. When 
Mr. Cameron, the wealthy builder, had refused 
us his pond for a skating-rink, Charlie had made 
so eloquent a reference to the old gentleman's 
liberal patronage of learning, that every winter 
thereafter the Cameron pond was free to the 
college. Mr. Cameron's donation was twenty 
dollars a year, but Charlie referred to it as if 
it had been twenty thousand. That we owed our 
rink to Charlie's clever plea, he did not permit us 
to forget. While, as in this case, he was often 
useful, and at times generous as well, he had a 
shrewd way of remembering his acts of usefulness 
and making them tell to his advantage in due 
season. Occasionally he showed a domineering 
streak, and he was disposed to think that whatever 
he could maintain against another, who might 



u8 AS OTHERS SEE US 

not be so ready of speech as himself, was right. 
To him I wrote : 

"You have it in you to make your mark at 
the bar and, perhaps, in politics. But remember 
that law and justice are different things, and that 
leaders never drive." 

Fifth and last was Ned Taylor, an Ottawa boy. 
Ned had a huskier physique than any other man 
at Frontenac. He formed our football club, and 
was its captain until he left college. His father 
had won an immense fortune in the lumber trade, 
and he was devotedly attached to this only son, 
whom one day he hoped to see in Parliament. 
Ned's pocket money was equal to a professor's 
salary, and it did him harm. It enabled him to 
indulge in extravagance of all kinds, and it made 
him the prey of two or three men in the class, who 
were mere parasites. Ned was manly and forceful , 
and he had talent, but now and then he would 
betray his consciousness of golden fortunes by a 
slur at the shabbiness of men better than himself 
in brain and heart. His chief defect was a violent 
temper. Once in an altercation with an extor- 
tionate ferryman, Ned thrashed the fellow so 
severely as to lay him up for a fortnight. This 
brought Ned within an ace of arrest and what 
would have followed arrest, expulsion from college. 
Glad to reach the end of my task, I wrote to him : 

"You may be in Parliament some day, if you 



AS OTHERS SEE US 119 

will work hard, take care of yourself, and keep 
clear of men who think more of what you can give 
them than they think about you. Strive to grow 
in self-control." 

As Easter came nearer day by day, I could notice 
my chums at their desks rather longer than college 
work demanded. Our evening chats grew short 
and lost much of their old freedom. Restraint 
was in the air, and yet little was said on the one 
subject in everybody's mind. On the last Tues- 
day of the term I handed Mac my "document." 
Nearly all the others, he told me, had already been 
given him. Two days afterward, on the morning 
when most of us were to take early trains home- 
ward, breakfast was as hurriedly dispatched as if an 
examination were at hand, and of a sterner sort 
than we had ever faced before. Breakfast over, 
I was buttoning my overcoat at the door, when an 
envelope was placed in my hand by Mac, ad- 
dressed in his clear round hand. During the long 
drive to the railroad station I could hardly resist 
the impulse to tear it open. No sooner was I in 
the car for Montreal than I unfolded my "docu- 
ment" and scanned it excitedly. It ran thus: 

"You think of studying medicine. Don't do 
it. You ought to go into some business. Be a 
little tidier: it would be well to brush your coat 
once a day any way. Some attention to politeness 
would improve you. You have talents for bank- 



120 AS OTHERS SEE US 

ing, or such like operations. You are inclined to 
be a little stingy. Sometimes you hurt people's 
feelings when you don't mean to. Speak with 
thought. Don't make any more verses. Prose 
is your line. Determination is a good thing, but 
when it looks like self-will it isn't a trait to 
be proud of. You have great capacities, but I 
think more to be a merchant than for a profes- 
sional career." 

I was stunned. This was truth with a venge- 
ance! Could it be that Mac, he of the serious 
countenance, had played a practical joke, and 
written all this himself? Impossible. Yet it 
was hard to believe that chums of mine could 
write such unfeeling criticism. I was deeply 
wounded, and to my pain was added the convic- 
tion that if other "documents" resembled mine, 
our little circle was broken forever. Was this 
to be the end of college friendships I had hoped 
to cherish through life? What an unspeakable 
pity that Will Blanchard had ever suggested this 
odious scheme of deliberate eavesdropping ! Again 
and again I read my document, until every word 
of it was burned into my brain. Glad was I that 
no one else from Frontenac was on the eastern 
train that morning to see my flushed face, and 
know what it meant. 

Gradually my angry mood gave way to a sullen 
feeling. How strange, I thought, that while I 



AS OTHERS SEE US 121 

had received no fewer than three recommenda- 
tions to go into business, no one had remembered 
how often I had wished to take charge of a ship. 
Had they forgotten my canoeing triumph, due to 
my handling a paddle better than any other man 
at Frontenac? Plainly enough, they had recalled 
most distinctly the occasions when, as class 
treasurer, I had made favorable terms with rail- 
road agents, caterers and printers for outings, 
suppers, and songs — and were these the most 
significant events of my college career? Then as 
to their personal remarks about my carefulness 
in money matters, my decision of mind, my 
clothes, and my poetry in the Kingston Whig. It 
was all intensely disagreeable, and yet I could not 
prevent the gradual rise of a conviction that it 
was truth and not ill-nature, that gave the sting 
to these criticisms. As the hours dragged along, 
O so slowly! scenes returned to my mind which 
had made little impression on me at the time of 
their occurrence, but which now revived them- 
selves with new meaning. Had I not often been 
sarcastic with my classmates without provocation ; 
and sometimes uncomplying for the mere sake of 
saying No? When I had a little authority given 
me, was I not inclined to exercise it overmuch? 
And there was no use in blinking my untidiness. 
Of course a good many people had absurd notions 
about primness and order, but was I not a little 



122 AS OTHERS SEE US 

too careless about my clothes and the other 
contents of my room? Was I really stingy? I 
was careful. Men who were otherwise might 
call me a tight-wad if they chose. Still, when 
Benson, the college janitor had died, and a sub- 
scription was taken up for his family, I could 
have given more than a single dollar toward it. 

It was a fortunate part of Mac's share in carry- 
ing out Blanchard's scheme that our documents 
had been handed us just as we were separating 
for our vacation. It saved us from facing each 
other just after the interchange of opinions 
most painfully frank. My portion of them quite 
spoiled my holidays. But the Easter vacation 
came to an end at last and I returned to Frontenac 
with a reluctance I had never felt before. Once 
more at Professor Macdonald's, our mutual 
greetings were certainly less cordial than usual. 
"Documents" were uppermost in every mind. 
Work that day duly resumed and finished, Charlie 
Ashfield and I were entering the back parlor, 
about nine o'clock, when Ned Taylor roared, as he 
strode out, quivering with rage : 

"There's somebody in this place too mean to 
live. I shall quit Frontenac in ten weeks, and 
if we were all to stay here ten years, I would want 
nothing to say to any of you." 

This explosion cleared the air. In the general 
talk which followed, it came out that every one 



AS OTHERS SEE US 123 

had been as much distressed as myself. Nobody 
went into particulars, and we agreed that as we 
had all meant to be fair, and as each of us had 
probably taken as sharp hits as he had given, 
there was nothing to grumble about. We all 
expected to be graduated at the close of that 
term, and whether it was that we were to be 
together so short a time, or that we were sobered 
by the near approach of after-college life, there 
remained an unwonted seriousness upon us all. 

The plow of time passes over the characters of 
men, bringing to birth an element here, and hiding 
another there, yet I think ever turning over much 
the same ground. Fifty years and more have 
passed since Dr. Marshall distributed his parch- 
ments to us six of the class of '67. How has it 
been with us since? 

Ned Taylor kept his word, and never spoke to 
one of us again. He must have been cut to the 
quick to feel a resentment so abiding. Poor Ned ! 
His fortunes were soon sadly altered from the days 
when his athletic feats and his rosy expectations 
made him the envied man of Frontenac. At 
twenty-eight, on his father's death, he inherited 
a vast property. Through mismanagement and 
dissipation it melted away in four years or less. 
By grace of political allies he was granted a clerk- 
ship in the very House of Commons where he had 
hoped to be a leader. I saw him from the gallery 



124 AS OTHERS SEE US 

one night during a protracted debate, more than 
thirty years ago. He looked prematurely wizened 
and gray. His face had the disheartened look of 
a man who invites failure by expecting failure. 
Two or three years afterward he was stricken 
with pneumonia, and succumbed. 

Charlie Ashfield early in his career cultivated 
with care his gifts of eloquence and plausibility, 
and turned them to good account. He is the 
foremost solicitor in Albertville, Ontario, and 
was long ago appointed Crown Prosecutor in that 
city. As a young man he was always ready to 
be secretary of this guild, and treasurer of that 
lodge, so that, in the scarcity of men to do hard 
and faithful work of that kind, he has, I think, 
won a prominence and usefulness greater than 
was promised in his student days. 

Will Blanchard, who suggested the document- 
ary exchange, the life and soul of our little Kings- 
ton household, died when less than fifty. Shortly 
after he left Frontenac, Will joined the staff of 
the Toronto Dispatch. Within three years he 
was writing its leaders. His versatile, well-stored 
mind focused itself with interest and illumination 
on whatever might be the chief topic of the day. 
One stormy November night, while on his way to 
Duluth, his steamer, the Winona, foundered on a 
reef in Lake Superior, and Will was of the two 
score passengers who perished. Shall we account 



AS OTHERS SEE US 125 

his work as a journalist as of little worth, simply 
because its effect we cannot trace and prove? 
Is not the baker as important to us as the stone- 
mason? 

Louis Leclair, our Frenchman, so full of enthusi- 
asm, is superintendent of a large lumber mill on 
Puget Sound. I met him in Tacoma last July, 
and a keenness unpromised in the youth gleamed 
in the clear eye of the veteran. His position was 
won by dint of the mechanical aptitudes he de- 
spised at Frontenac. As he showed me his colossal 
machinery of handling logs, dividing and shaping 
them for a thousand uses, my mind went back 
to his day of small things when Louis's mechanical 
resources were limited to the scant contents of 
Mac's carpentry chest. I was once more reminded 
of old college times when Louis, with impassioned 
accents, told me of the commanding ability of 
his chiefs, of the certainty that the Pacific Coast 
would soon far eclipse in ports and shipping the 
Atlantic shores of the Union. 

I was right as to Ben Murray. It would have 
been a serious mistake for him to have taken to 
law. Its demands in the way of ready utterance, 
its atmosphere of contest, would never have 
suited him. He soon became his father's partner, 
and has long been his successor, extending to vast 
proportions the business which he inherited. 
Never, he boasts with just pride, has there been a 



126 AS OTHERS SEE US 

strike, or a threat of striking, by his work-people. 
Ben was no morning glory, there was no precocity 
about him in any way, and every year of his life 
shows growth in his mind and character. A new 
and thoroughly meritorious invention, to reduce 
the cost of railroad construction, is always offered 
to Ben Murray first, to other contractors after- 
ward. From remarks he dropped when last I 
saw him in Buffalo, I believe that he contemplates 
giving a handsome endowment to a leading college 
of western New York. 

And lastly, what of myself? My "document" 
I must confess, hard as it hit me, was in the main 
just. Every politician hears much the same kind 
of criticism from his foes. When he is a sensible 
man, he takes to heart such of these rebukes as 
he knows to be true, and that course, in some 
measure, has been mine. And after all, slowly 
as this world improves, it would improve more 
slowly still were it not for the unceasing and un- 
sparing shafts of censors who know no fear. 

Abandoning my medical program, I entered 
business the year I left college, and have not 
disappointed the expectations of success therein 
predicted for me in my "document." As long 
ago as '8 1 I was given a seat at the directors' 
board of the Empire Bank, the youngest man 
ever elected to that honor by the shareholders. 
My craving for the sea, lively throughout my life, 



AS OTHERS SEE US 127 

has taken me, always, however, as a cabin passen- 
ger, several times across the Atlantic, from Halifax 
to Havana, and from Vancouver to San Diego. 
Although even yet I cannot recall my "document " 
without a twinge, I think it has helped me to 
master in some degree the difficult art of life. 
That art should include, if possible, getting at 
others' opinions of one's self, with a view to revis- 
ing the self-praise which makes so many of us 
content to be less than our poor best. 



ALMOST A TRAGEDY 

Lay hands suddenly on no man. I Timothy v., 22. 

Long before the Muskoka country had become 
the magnet that it is to-day, I discovered Bream 
Lake, on its northern border, and enjoyed long 
holidays there, thanks to capital fishing, good 
company, and the absence of a telegraph office. 
My shack was quite four miles from my post- 
office, then served from Toronto but once a day. 
It was at Bream Lake that I first met Donald 
Brace, a sportsman every inch of his six feet. 
Neither rain nor mist ever repressed his ardor for 
a jaunt, and he would have remained at the Lake 
every fall until snow flew, had not the call of his 
bank obliged him to return to King Street. 

One winter morning, on my desk at the Hotel 
Alpha in New York, I received a brief note from 
Brace. He expected to pay me a visit on a mat- 
ter of urgency on the Thursday following, which 
meant within twenty-four hours of my reading 
his word. Next day the early train from Toronto 
brought him to the Alpha, where we were soon 
quietly chatting in Parlor B. He told me his 

errand. 

128 



ALMOST A TRAGEDY 129 

"You have often heard me speak of my daughter 
Alice, my only child. Last June she crossed 
the Atlantic in the Idaho with her mother. One 
of the passengers was Frank Yates, a young actor. 
He soon made an impression on Alice, who began 
taking part in charades when she was twelve, 
and who played Lady Teazle at little more than 
sixteen, and played it well, let me tell you. Yates, 
confound him, is a handsome fellow, with talent 
and education, and he takes pains to please women 
with compliments laid on with a trowel. Why, he 
won my old wife's heart as well as the affection 
of Alice. Before the Idaho touched Liverpool, 
Alice secretly engaged herself to Yates, and unless 
strong measures are taken at once they will marry 
in March. Alice became of age last November, 
and a more willful girl never breathed." 

"Why shouldn't she marry Yates? Is there 
anything against him, except that he is on the 
stage?" 

"Only this: rumors reach us that he is married 
already, and I wish to know the truth beyond a 
peradventure. Yates is playing in the Van Vleck 
Comedy Company of New York, and you may 
be able to uncover his record, and prevent this 
threatened union. Draw upon me for all expenses, 
and don't be niggardly. At the same time I mean 
to put the utmost pressure upon Alice, for I hear 
only unsavory reports regarding Yates." 



130 ALMOST A TRAGEDY 

"It strikes me as a difficult case. At the mo- 
ment I don't see anything to do but to engage 
the best private detective to be had. But I'll 
turn the matter over in my mind and if a better 
plan suggests itself, I'll act at once." 

Early in the afternoon I had another chat with 
Brace, who brought me a photograph of Yates. 
It presented a set smirk, so plainly artificial as to 
be repellent. But his face was distinctly hand- 
some, for all that. Brace that night returned 
home, profoundly grieved and perplexed as to 
the case he had placed in my hands. As I passed 
the hotel desk on my way to the elevator, Paul 
Griffin, the room-clerk, gave me a nod and "Good- 
evening." Responding with another nod it 
flashed upon me that Griffin might help me in my 
difficult quest. My acquaintance with Griffin be- 
gan two years before, when as agent for Joseph 
Jefferson he brought Rip Van Winkle to Montreal. 
About nine o'clock, when theater-goers had left 
the rotunda still and quiet, I sought Griffin's 
aid. 

"Paul, do you know Madame Van Vleck, or 
any of her company?" 

"I don't know her, or anybody in her company 
this winter. But I know Billy Gray, who was her 
treasurer for three years until last spring." 

"Where is Billy Gray? In New York do you 
suppose?" 



ALMOST A TRAGEDY 131 

" I think he is. His brother Walter has a music 
shop just below the Metropolitan Opera House, on 
the same side of Broadway. He can tell you where 
Billy is. Very likely you may find his place open 
now, if you care to cross town at once. Walter 
sells theater tickets on the side, they tell me." 

I thanked Griffin for his information, and 
within fifteen minutes, wrapped against a gale 
in overcoat and muffler, I found myself in the 
narrow premises of Walter Gray. His counter 
left scant room for his customers, and his shelves 
and showcases were overcrowded, I thought. 
In answer to a question as to his brother, he said, 
"0, yes, Billy quit the road last year. He is at 
Milliken's, in the jewelry line, on Union Square. 
He has a fair salary there, but not what he earned 
with the Van Vlecks. Still, after forty a man tires 
of one-night-stands in small towns. And the 
hotels, Gee! Don't say a word!" 

I expressed my hearty thanks to Walter Gray. 
Next morning I called on his brother William. 
He was a somewhat battered specimen of mankind, 
small of stature, keen of eye, with a puckered 
mouth that looked as if it were shut most of the 
time. 

"Your friend, Paul Griffin at the Alpha, tells 
me that you were treasurer of the Van Vleck 
troupe. Do you know Frank Yates, their leading 
man?" 



132 ALMOST A TRAGEDY 

"Yes, I have known Frank for years. He is 
their walking gentleman: a first-rate actor, and a 
pleasant chap to meet, — a Southerner, I fancy." 

"I'm glad you know him. A young lady of 
good family has fallen in love with him, and they 
are to be married in March. I wish to find out 
about him, about his character, I mean, not his 
ability on the stage. You know that sometimes 
black sheep make their way into the profession." 

"You're right, they do. But suppose you let 
me call on Paul Griffin, and find out a little about 
you before I say much about Frank Yates? I'll 
drop in at the Alpha to-night, after supper, and 
you may look in here to-morrow forenoon. How 
will that do?" 

"That will suit me all right. I'll call about 
eleven o'clock." 

At that hour I saw Gray once more. It was 
clear that Griffin had commended me as worthy 
of confidence. A friendly look shone out of his 
eyes as they met mine; their keenness and ob- 
liquity of gaze had vanished. I was, he felt, a 
man to whom the whole truth might be told. 

"Frank Yates is an infernal scoundrel," he 
began. "He is always having women fall in love 
with him. He is a soft-spoken, alluring chap, all 
attention and flattery. He must have good blood 
in him, though, to have that silvery voice, and 
that way of spouting sentimental verses and never 



ALMOST A TRAGEDY 133 

overdoing it. About three years ago there was 
some talk in the company of his having married 
a cotton planter's daughter, in Mobile, I think it 
was. But he is a rascal, and married or single 
the truth isn't in him. Any woman who trusts 
his oily talk will repent it bitterly. Where girls 
are concerned, Frank Yates is a liar, through 
and through. Otherwise, I know nothing against 
him. He has always paid his way, as far as I 
know." 

"But how can I find out as to this rumored 
marriage in Mobile? I am seeking facts strong 
enough to break the engagement betwixt Yates 
and a young lady of good family whom he has 
mesmerized, confound him!" 

"You see it is a good while since I left the Van 
Vlecks. Now that I think of it, there's Hubert 
Chapman of the Heart and Hand Company 
playing at the Fourteenth Street Theater this 
week, I believe. Hubert traveled last winter 
with Frank Yates, and knows him like a book. 
Go and see Hubert and take him this card from 
me. We joined the Elks together last Christmas. 
He can give you just the facts you want, I am 
certain." 

I thanked Gray warmly for his aid and counsel, 
and within five minutes I had turned out of 
Union Square and entered the Fourteenth Street 
Theater, only to see Arrah na Pogue on its bill- 



134 ALMOST A TRAGEDY 

board, the Heart and Hand Company having gone 
to the Chestnut Street Theater, Philadelphia. 
As I ambled homeward it struck me that, with 
some profit, I could pay a visit to a publisher in 
Philadelphia, and at the same time confer with 
Hubert Chapman. When I reached my desk I 
wrote a note to Chapman, stating that in two or 
three days I would call on him with a card from 
William Gray. 

On the following Thursday I duly arrived in 
Philadelphia, and forthwith took my way to the 
Chestnut Street Theater. Threading my steps 
through a labyrinth of scenery and costume 
trunks, I asked at the stage-door for Mr. Chap- 
man. The record-book did not give his hotel. 

"Where are the other members of the com- 
pany?" I inquired. 

" O, all around. Some are at the Bingham ; two 
or three are at the Girard ; Mr. Chapman may be 
at the Continental — he's our leading man." 

As I retraced my steps through the theater 
alley, I heard a piping voice, "Mister, Mister, 
if you want Mr. Chapman, he's at the Continental. 
He has just sent a boy for his letters and keys." 

My informant was the shrunken mite of a man 
whom I had left inside the stage-door a moment 
before. A dime brought gladness to the old waif 's 
eye, and he had difficulty in believing that I could 
reach the Continental without his escort. Two 



ALMOST A TRAGEDY 135 

minutes later my card was carried to Mr. Chap- 
man's room. He was in: would I go upstairs? 

Rapping at his door, a loud "Come in" greeted 
me. There stood a big, jovial man of fifty, 
drying his face on a towel. 

"Be seated," he said, "you wrote me about 
Frank Yates. He opens in Columbus, Ohio, at 
the Olympic, next Monday, where a letter will 
reach him as early as Sunday noon." 

"Thank you, Mr. Chapman, but I do not wish 
to write to Mr. Yates. May I tell you most 
confidentially, that I am looking into his record 
a little. By the way here is a card from Mr. 
Gray." 

Chapman scanned the card : at once it unlocked 
his heart and his lips. 

"Tell me, what scrape has Frank been getting 
into now?" 

"Just this, he has engaged himself to a good, 
respectable girl, and means to marry her in 
March." 

"The — blackguard! How did that come 
about?" 

"Why he met her last June on the Idaho, 
crossing from New York to Liverpool." 

"He did! Why he's a married man. I was a 
witness when he joined hands with Miss Sarah 
Gridley at St. Abel's in Petersburg, Virginia, less 
than twelve months ago. Whether his wife is 



136 ALMOST A TRAGEDY 

alive to-day or not, she was certainly alive two 
months since, when I met her in the lobby of the 
National Theater in Washington." 

"Good heavens! What luck to hit upon you! 
Have you any objection to signing a statement of 
the facts you have just told me?" 

"None whatever. I will do anything in my 
power to block the villiany of Frank Yates." 

In a few minutes I drew up a brief statement 
that the undersigned had witnessed the marriage 
of Frank Yates and Sarah Gridley at St. Abel's 
Church, Petersburg, on or about December 15, 
18 — . Within an hour I wrote to Donald Brace, 
enclosing the formal declaration of Hubert Chap- 
man. That document undeceived Alice Brace, 
who then and there annulled her foolish betrothal. 

Five years passed. Walking along Third Ave- 
nue one afternoon, I read a billboard announcing 
that at the Ruby Theater the Van Vleck Com- 
pany was giving All for Gold to crowded houses. 
To the box-office, then, of the Ruby, where I 
secured an orchestra chair for fifty cents. Eight 
o'clock came, and up went the curtain upon a very 
red-and-gold scene of pasteboard luxury, represent- 
ing, the program said, the interior of a senator's 
mansion on Fifth Avenue. In the second act 
Frank Yates appeared. He was the lover, poor, 
but of lofty ideals, kindled with a zeal for ter-ruth 
that meant vic-to-ree over wrong. As his lines 



ALMOST A TRAGEDY 137 

fell from his lips I am sure that nobody else in the 
house watched him as intently as I did. In figure 
he was stout, and his face was so full as to seem 
greasy. His hair was elaborately brushed, and 
around his temples were the flourishes that a 
Bowery barber deems the culmination of his art. 
Here surely was only an imitation gentleman, 
who had trained his voice to coo with a " come-to- 
me" vibration that was simply exasperating. 
And yet those cadences had swayed the heart of 
so sensible a girl as Alice Brace. When the curtain 
fell, I left the theater, I had had enough. 

As I walked home, many a peccadillo, I mused, 
stands at the debit in my ledger of life. But I 
had rescued a good girl from that hollow impostor, 
and that act surely must have weight at the final 
balance of my accounts. Serene in this confidence, 
I slept that night as sleeps a sinless babe. 



Choosing Books 

A Lecture at Hackley School, Tarrytown, N. Y. 
April 5, 19 1 7 



139 



CHOOSING BOOKS 

A Lecture at Hackley School, Tarry town, N. Y., 
April 5, 1 917 

When first I went to school, a good many years 
ago, an older boy told me that Robinson Crusoe 
was the best book he had ever read. That winter 
he lent me the volume, and I felt sorely grieved 
when my father said that the work was mere 
fiction, that there had never been any real Crusoe 
or his man Friday. Soon afterward another 
schoolmate lent me Dana's Two Years Before 
the Mast, but its truth did not stir me as did the 
marvelously invented chapters of Defoe. And 
so my reading went on month by month, year by 
year. As one of the youngest boys in our class, 
I listened to what other boys said about books 
really worth while. And thus, without planning 
it at all, I began to depend upon better informed 
folk than myself in choosing my books, and that 
practice became a habit useful to me ever since. 
To be sure, my first counselors in the school-yard 
varied a good deal in knowledge and in soundness 
of judgment. I can remember a dozen paltry 

141 



142 CHOOSING BOOKS 

romances, imitated from Cooper, that swept 
through our school in a whirlwind of popularity, 
forerunning the Harkaway series of a later day. 
And yet, in the main, so sensible was the pilotage 
I enjoyed, that by the time I was fourteen or so 
I had read Scott's Guy Mannering and Quentin 
Durward; Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables; 
Cooper's Last of the Mohicans; Dickens's Oliver 
Twist and David Copper field; Thackeray's Henry 
Esmond; and that capital story of whaling adven- 
ture, Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. Even in 
those distant days it was plain that boys find 
interest in the shelves of grown-up folk. Indeed 
many of the books written for boys, such as the 
Henty series, have a distinct flavor of milk and 
water, with a good deal more water than milk. 
Incomparably better are the novels of Scott and 
Cooper, Stevenson and Kipling, as keenly relished 
by manly boys as by men who continue to be 
boys as long as they live. 

As the years of youth followed one another, my 
range in fiction grew constantly a little wider. 
Where an author, as Walter Scott, attracted me 
forcefully, I took up every book of his that I 
could lay my hands on. Then new acquaintances 
were added. The Warden of Anthony Trollope 
opened the door to his Barchester series, which 
I could now reread with pleasure. In due time 
I came to Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. I 



CHOOSING BOOKS 143 

hope this year to find time to take up once 
more The Three Musketeers and The Toilers of the 
Sea. But after all, novels are simply the dessert 
of literature, and my shelves began to show a few 
biographies and histories, three or four treatises 
of science, with a little travel and exploration by 
way of change and refreshment. In gathering 
these more solid books I drew upon the information 
and good sense of men who knew literature by 
study, by comparison, by tests in teaching, and in 
writing for the press. One of my advisers was a 
librarian of rare judgment and untiring good-will. 
I recall him to-day with a grateful heart. His 
library would be deemed a small and poor collec- 
tion in these times, but its contents were well 
chosen, and my old friend was a tactful adapter 
of books to readers. He was rewarded by seeing 
that when lads become familiar with the best 
writing they are impatient with any other. No- 
body who moves in Fifth Avenue society cares to 
cultivate comrades on the Bowery or Fourteenth 
Street. 

An early discovery in our little northern library 
astonished me. As a boy I had looked upon 
history and applied science with mingled awe and 
dislike. Books in those fields might do for lawyers 
and doctors, clergymen and bank cashiers, but for 
boys, no! I found, to my delight, that Macaulay 
and Parkman, Tyndall, Huxley, and Bagehot were 



144 CHOOSING BOOKS 

every whit as interesting as Hawthorne and Poe. 
And there was, besides, the feeling that truth is 
truth, while fiction is but its shadow. It was with 
quickened pulse that I read the lives of James 
Watt, of George Stephenson, and of Charles 
Goodyear. Long before I was twenty, the great 
inventors and discoverers were my heroes, and 
my heroes they have remained. When first I 
came under their spell my old friend, the librarian, 
remarked that I was reading nothing but invention 
and discovery. He did me a good service as he 
recommended "a balanced ration" in my books. 
I have never forgotten that counsel. In class- 
room at school or college, chemistry may follow 
upon history, and composition upon either Latin 
or algebra, by turns giving exercise and rest to 
widely different faculties of one's brain. There is 
like profit in keeping together on one's table John 
Burroughs and Francis Parkman, William James 
and John Muir. King David never was wiser 
than when he exclaimed, "0 sing unto the Lord 
a new song!" In maintaining a due diversity in 
one's reading it is well to consult a librarian of 
experience. He knows which are the best books 
in each department, and a tour of every alcove 
may discover in a young reader tastes for the 
drama, for bird-lore, or aught else, which until 
then lay dormant in his brain. A librarian, 
too, learns more than anybody else regarding the 



CHOOSING BOOKS 145 

new books of merit which constantly teem from 
the press. He hears comments from the best read 
men and women in his town or city; he weighs 
and compares the leading reviews of books as they 
appear in such a journal as the New York Nation; 
and he is usually able to hand you the books he 
names, often with opportunities for comparing 
two or three with one another. A museum of 
natural history, a botanical garden, an aquarium, 
an art gallery, even a cotton-mill, takes on new 
meaning and fresh allurement when one has a 
thoroughly informed guide who wishes his visitors 
to share his knowledge and enthusiasm. What has 
taken him years to learn may be focussed into 
a single perambulation. So also when a good 
library has its treasures unfolded by a custodian 
of mark. He may display a gallery of Indian 
chiefs and medicine-men, such as those pictured 
by Mr. Edward S. Curtis. Or, he opens a superb 
collection of ballads, such as that of the late Pro- 
fessor Child of Harvard. Or he may show us a 
portfolio of wild-flowers, aglow with every tint of 
summer ; and there and then an interest is planted 
to yield harvests of cheer as long as we live. 
Indeed, in the field of literature, as in every other 
field of life, our success will largely turn up- 
on choice of guides and advisers. Every large 
modern business proceeds step by step as its 
chieftains, who may be engineers, mechanics. 



146 CHOOSING BOOKS 

chemists, physicists, builders, or salesmen, take 
full counsel with one another. In the high and 
thorny road of citizenship our duty is often pivoted 
upon the careful choice of leaders, whom we ex- 
change for better leaders — if, happily, these are 
to be found. 

When men distinguished for knowledge, ability, 
and wisdom are unanimous, we bow to their deci- 
sions. One such verdict is that the Bible and 
Shakespeare are so supreme in merit, have so 
profoundly colored human history, that they 
should be read by one's twenty-first birthday, and 
studied as long as we live. With regard to these 
golden books there may be reluctance. Here it 
is well to take advantage of occasions. Suppose 
we see Shakespeare's Henry VIII, what time is 
more fitting to read that play, and then pass 
to a much greater work, Henry IV? Then may 
follow Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and the other 
chief creations of our first dramatist. With re- 
spect to the Bible allow me to repeat what can 
never be said too often: it is incomparably the 
richest literary heritage of our race. In Isaiah, 
in the Psalms, in the Gospels, in the letters of 
Saint Paul, are the master tones of human elo- 
quence. One cause of the primacy of English 
literature is the familiarity of English-speaking 
nations with their Scriptures. And how wide a 
gulf between the Bible itself and the best writing 



CHOOSING BOOKS 147 

by its students! John Bunyan has given us our 
only allegory of human life. It holds but one 
parable, that of the man with the muckrake, 
worthy to be read on the same day with "The 
Ninety and Nine," "The Sower," and "The 
Prodigal Son." When you get a Bible take the 
trouble to find an edition which includes The 
Apocrypha. Its books, as remarkable as those 
of the Old Testament, have fallen into unmerited 
neglect. Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solo- 
mon are on the same high plane as the Book of 
Proverbs. 

If interest in Shakespeare may be stimulated 
by witnessing one of his plays, interest in other 
books may be sown as we observe the anniver- 
saries of history, year by year. Lincoln Day has 
incited many a young reader to take up a brief 
biography of the martyred President. For refer- 
ence, the ten volumes by his secretaries, Hay and 
Nicolay, are indispensable. A single volume 
has been condensed from this series of ten books. 
Not only historical dates, but historical places, 
have their incitements for us. One of the glories 
of American literature is Washington Irving. 
Where may we read The Sketchbook with more 
zest than at Tarrytown, the home of Irving, and 
still the home of his kindred, two of whom have 
attended Hackley School? When the leaves, all 
too few, of The Sketchbook have been turned, 



148 CHOOSING BOOKS 

Bracebridge Hall may come next, then The Con- 
quest of Granada and, if time permits, the 
Life of the author himself, which includes his 
matchless letters, recounting his friendships with 
Walter Scott, and other illustrious men. And in 
such eventful days as these through which we 
are now passing, biography and history receive 
new and striking additions every twenty-four 
hours. Often the recital of a great battle, such as 
that of the Marne; of such an overturn as that of 
the Russian autocracy, leads us into a book 
alcove we had never entered before. Several 
leading public libraries spread on their bulletin 
boards the chief occurrences of each passing week, 
at home and abroad, naming such of their books, 
reports, and articles as cast light upon them. Thus 
value is conferred upon many a tome which other- 
wise would sleep in unbroken rest. Much of the 
best writing on the European war has appeared 
in magazines. None of this work is more worthy 
of study than the proposals by Dr. Charles W. 
Eliot, ex-President Taft, and others, to assure a 
permanent peace when this conflict comes to an 
end. Only in a public library, amply equipped, 
thoroughly indexed, and catalogued, may we fol- 
low this momentous discussion. 

Librarians tell us that while the demand for 
biography and history is increasing, poetry is 
seldom asked for, despite the charm of modern 



CHOOSING BOOKS 149 

verse, and its intimate reflection of modern life. 
One reason is that poetry is bought rather than 
borrowed from libraries, like fiction. Another 
reason is that, as a rule, poets write too much, and 
offer us their gems, as the stars in heaven, de- 
cidedly far apart. Here anthologies proffer us 
both chart and compass. At the outset of one's 
reading it is not feasible even if it were desirable, 
to know the great poets from lid to lid. The 
anthologies edited by Dana and by Bryant, though 
somewhat time-worn, are still worth having. 
Small and recent collections, which may tempt 
the timid beginner, have been brought together 
by Miss Jessie B. Rittenhouse, Professor Louns- 
bury, and Edmund Gosse. Comprehensive in 
its riches is the Home Book of Verse edited by 
Professor Burton E. Stevenson. In his pages 
are well-chosen examples of Shakespeare and 
Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. There, too, 
are representative pages from Dryden, Pope, 
Cowper, and other singers who might otherwise be 
mere names to us. And here are lyrics by Sir 
Philip Sidney, Andrew Marvell, James Shirley, 
Blanco White, Henry David Thoreau, and many 
another chorister who rose into the upper sky but 
once or twice in a lifetime. From such an ante- 
room he may pass at will to the full round of 
any poet who commands our personal allegiance, 
Keats or Poe, Browning or Emerson, let us say. 



150 CHOOSING BOOKS 

And now we may pass from poetry to a wholly 
different sphere, that of earning our daily bread. 
Wide and varied indeed is the literature of the 
livelihoods. When a definite trade or profession 
is being prepared for, and is duly entered upon, its 
books must be wisely laid under contribution. 
Here one's choice is of moment as never before, 
so that there should be an access of care in seeking 
advisers. An alumnus of this School is to plan 
chemical works as their engineer. Another has 
adopted the metallurgy of copper as his life-work. 
Agriculture has attracted a third pupil of Hackley 
School, and a fourth is now an expert in fuel 
economy. Their widely different books will be 
assembled in the light of counsel from their 
teachers, with many a recent title worth heeding 
from men in successful practice. And they will 
listen with both ears to what is said by the men 
just a step or two ahead of them, who stand 
nearest to them, and within arm's reach. A 
guide ceases to be of any use when he strides so 
far ahead as to be hidden by the curvature of the 
earth. Helpful books are supplemented by peri- 
odicals of like quality. Electrical engineers 
broaden and revise their information by the 
weekly advent of The Electrical World. With equal 
gain iron-smelters and steel-workers turn the 
leaves of The Iron Age to keep abreast of the 
advances there set forth. All such journals 



CHOOSING BOOKS 151 

review the current books in their special provinces, 
engaging competent and trustworthy critics for 
the task. 

Reviews of this stamp form a golden resource in 
a great technical library, such as that of the 
Engineering Societies at 29 West 39th Street, 
New York. Here the librarian renders aid to 
engineers not only in America, but throughout 
the world. For a small fee he furnishes copies of 
chapters, articles, reports, plans, and illustrations, 
in any requested department, as they appear. 
A huge camera turns out these copies in facsimile. 
Think what it means to a copper smelter in 
Arizona, a nickel miner in Northern Ontario, to 
enjoy this service. And aid just as important is 
springing up in another quarter. Among the 
leaders in American engineering are Stone & 
Webster of Boston, who build and operate water- 
works, power-plants, and the like. This corpora- 
tion has a large, carefully chosen library for its 
staff, with Mr. G. W. Lee as librarian. He is 
organizing "sponsors" to keep watch and ward 
regarding specific subjects, reinforced concrete, 
the uses of electric heat in metallurgy, and so on. 
These sponsors are to render service as counselors 
to librarians, or in giving information to individual 
inquirers. 

In a field remote from engineering, that of 
American history, the student has more rest and 



152 CHOOSING BOOKS 

quiet than if his desk were in Thirty-ninth Street. 
As Daniel Webster said, "the past at least is 
secure," and the yearly additions to our annals 
seldom modify our established traditions and our 
long accepted story of the birth and growth, and 
the rebirth, of our Union. Here, then, is a tract 
where the pilots are not liable to the supersedure 
constantly imminent in every zone of applied 
science. In 1902 the American Library Associa- 
tion, at my instance, issued The Literature cj 
American History, edited by the late Mr. J. N. 
Larned of Buffalo. Its 4100 titles were brought 
together by forty scholars, each a sound judge in 
his field, who gave every chosen book a brief note. 
The more important departments, those of Colo- 
nial times and the Civil War, for example, are 
introduced by a page or two of general and most 
helpful survey. This guide closes with three lists : 
the first, very brief, is suitable for a school library; 
the second is somewhat longer; the third is still 
fuller, comprising about five hundred volumes, 
worthy to form a good working library. It was 
my hope that supplements might continue this 
work year by year. But the cost and toil of 
preparation forbade more than two issues. Let us 
expect that in due time the American Library 
Association will republish Mr. Larned's manual, 
brought down to date, to be followed by annual 
supplements of like range and merit. Then, 



CHOOSING BOOKS 153 

with lessons of experience in mind, other fields of 
literature may be attacked, so that with the least 
possible delay the best available judgments on 
worth-while books may be placed at the service 
of every reader and student in America. If so 
bold a program gives us pause, minor departments 
of books may be adjudged as opportunities arise. 
Early in 19 16 Professor Clarence B. Thompson 
of Harvard University, at my request, gave the 
American Library Association a short list of works 
on Scientific Management, with luminous notes. 
That list but adds to the homage paid by engineers 
the world over to the memory of the late Frederick 
Winslow Taylor. The authors convened by Pro- 
fessor Thompson are first and chiefly Mr. Tay- 
lor, and then his disciples. 

In so far as we are disciples of Mr. Taylor we 
will cultivate efficiency in reading as in all else that 
we do. But let us remember that Mr. Taylor, one 
of the wisest men who ever lived, added to the 
output of his workmen by giving them rest- 
periods ever and anon. I dare say that here he 
took a leaf out of school practice, and borrowed 
the " recesses " so popular at Tarry town. It is well 
to be systematic in our choice and use of books. 
It is also well to leave the highways of letters from 
time to time, and wander at will in their by-paths, 
seeking rest, and refreshment. Before the present 
war your veteran traveler saw Edinburgh, or 



154 CHOOSING BOOKS 

Florence, or Granada, so far as his guide-book 
instructed him. Then he closed his "Murray" 
and took a stroll along roads and lanes unmapped 
and alluring. Thus he came upon a forsaken 
shrine, or a workshop of mosaic, or he found a 
moss-grown sepulchre, not set down in his itiner- 
ary. Habitual readers have days when they 
shut their desks and haunt book stores, all the 
way from Mr. Putnam's sumptuous premises 
to the dingy dens of lower Fourth Avenue and 
Vesey Street. It was in Leary's famous bookery 
in Philadelphia that I first came upon Hudson's 
Naturalist on the La Plata, the best book of its 
kind known to me. In the unlikeliest corners 
of New York and London, Paris and Madrid, I 
have found song-books and old plays worth their 
weight in platinum. One whole winter I sought 
in vain a picture of a smoke-jack turning a joint 
before a fire. Next May I went to Boston and, 
of course, to Cornhill, where my quest came to an 
end in a magazine, grimy with years of neglect. 
Many another find awaits a pilgrim in the sixties 
as he trudges, heedless of bumps, through Ann 
Street and Fulton Street. There on a ten-cent 
tray is the very edition of Scott that he read as a 
boy, with its notes at the end of each volume. 
Besides it is the original form of Holmes's Auto- 
crat of the Breakfast Table, with its portraits of 
"the poor relation" and "the young man called 



CHOOSING BOOKS 155 

John," never reproduced. And thus the Indian 
summer of life has joys all its own as one rereads 
old favorites and compares impressions fifty years 
apart. Thrice happy is he who early in life 
chooses a worthy theme which he can pursue in 
highways and byways as long as he lives. It 
may be the life of a national hero, as Lincoln ; of a 
great inventor, as Edison; or it may be the story 
of his native town, Gibraltar, Boston, or Ply- 
mouth-of-the-pilgrimage. Or he may be drawn 
to the unfolding panorama of photography in 
education, the advances in wireless telegraph 
and telephony. Or, if he be modest, he may 
content himself with a study of that wonderful 
instrument, the gyroscope, which supplants the 
mariner's compass, and anon steadies a ship or an 
aeroplane in storm and tempest. As he diligently 
adds to his notes, clippings, and books; as these 
are digested by faithful observation or experiment, 
he gradually rises to the judicial bench which so 
well served him in earlier days. His delight now 
is, as well as he can, to hand the torch of knowl- 
edge to beginners who stand to-day where he 
stood forty or fifty years ago. 

Whether we read as a duty, or for simple enjoy- 
ment, our choice will turn upon the careers before 
us, and upon the make of our individual minds. 
Students who take up law as their profession will 
read in alcoves far removed from those of Water 



156 CHOOSING BOOKS 

Supply, or Yellow Fever Prophylaxis. In our 
scant leisure most of us would not be refreshed, 
but bored, by Montaigne, Browning, or George 
Meredith. Yet there are men and women who 
esteem these authors so highly that they commit 
their pages to memory, to enjoy their daily 
companionship. With wide diversities of human 
toil, of personal aptitudes, and inabilities, are 
there any general rules worth offering you this 
morning? 

Yes. But please consider them as open to 
amendment every day that you live and grow 
wiser. First of all it is well to know the supremely 
great books upon which trustworthy critics, gen- 
eration after generation, have set their seals of 
approval. Beyond that small nucleus, sketched 
in a list I have brought to you to-day, stretch the 
thousands of books among which you must choose 
as carefully as you can. In literature it is safe to 
begin with only the famous books, preferring those 
which have come of age, whose pages command 
reperusal for years after they left their authors' 
desks. Many new books, treating themes of the 
day, or otherwise working a popular vein of senti- 
ment or satire, are every year heralded with 
superlative praise. This praise does not impose 
upon veterans of the market-place. They know 
that it is too warm and too expensive to last long. 
A twelvemonth hence the claque will be blistering 



CHOOSING BOOKS 157 

its palms before some new eclipser of Tennyson 
and Lowell, Hawthorne and Holmes. 

In science, let us read the latest books by 
competent men who have a first-hand familiarity 
with their themes. Fortunately, in our leading 
schools of medicine and chemistry, physics and 
engineering, the teachers year by year embody 
their instruction in manuals of authority, masterly 
in exposition. Out-of-date studies of the carbon 
compounds, or of electrical transmission, are 
worthless except to the small class of historians 
who trace the development of a science step by 
step. An epoch-making work, such as Darwin's 
Origin of Species, should be read from cover to 
cover in preference to any book derived or abridged 
from its pages. There is always much gold in the 
wallet of such an explorer as Darwin which slips 
through the clumsy fingers of compilers and 
commentators. 

It is well from time to time to draw up a short 
list of books to be read, always in the light of the 
best counsel to be had. When such a list is ad- 
hered to, it will bring its possessor the joy of accom- 
plishment every year that he lives. During a 
twelvemonth he will survey, let us suppose, 
electrical progress in practice and theory. Or, 
he may read the life and writings of Benjamin 
Franklin, and understand the causes which led 
to the Revolution and to the foundation of this 



158 CHOOSING BOOKS 

Republic. There is an impassable gulf between 
systematic reading of this kind, and desultory- 
glancing at pages of all sorts. A hasty perusal of 
newspapers, a few minutes now and then over a 
magazine, a taking up of the shallow, ephemeral 
books forced upon one's notice day by day, builds 
no real knowledge, trains no genuine power of 
analysis or judgment. But a reader who steadily 
sticks to James Russell Lowell, let us say, through 
the evenings of a winter, has become intimate 
with a great wit, a convincing critic, and a true 
poet. Henceforth Lowell will stand among his 
friends and helpers. A handsome recompense 
this for firm adhesion to a simple and alluring 
purpose. Readers of this consecutive type are 
virtually explorers, although they do not suspect 
it , and they receive the explorer's reward. Stanley 
began every morning where he left off last night ; 
he explored Central Africa. The postman begins 
to-day where he began yesterday — and renews 
acquaintance with Tompkins Square. 

And here let me cite my own case. Forty years 
ago electric bulbs began to displace oil lamps and 
gas jets; not long afterward electric welders com- 
menced to drive flame welders out of use. Cool 
electric baths, such as had long been employed in 
plating tableware and the like, were adapted to 
separate copper from its ores more effectively than 
any furnace ever did. These advances, and others 



CHOOSING BOOKS 159 

as striking, led me to gather information as to the 
constant supersedere of flame by electricity, set 
forth in Flame, Electricity, and the Camera, pub- 
lished in 1900. You may remember that on 
Edison Day, 191 7, I addressed Hackley School on 
"Electric Empire," bringing to that date, with 
illustrations, the story told in my book seventeen 
years before. 1 So much for sticking to a single 

x My address concluded thus: 

In the electrician a new master has conquered the world, and 
with weapons so strong and cleaving that he brings every art and 
industry to harvests not to be imagined a century ago. He gives 
us the motive-power for every task in the phase which may at 
once, and fully, pass into any other. A touch and electricity 
gives us light as brilliant as sunshine. Another touch and intens- 
est heat throbs in the core of a crucible. Yet another touch, and 
w T e direct a chemical parting, as in dividing copper from its com- 
pounds ; or we effect a union equally desirable, as in building from 
air the nitrates to enrich our farms and gardens. Oftener still, 
we wish the swift rotation of a massive wheel, such as at head- 
quarters generated our current itself. We ply a switch and our 
desire becomes enacted law. 

Since men first trod this world they have rejoiced in light to guide 
their hands and feet, to reveal form and color, and, infinitely 
beyond the swing of hand or arm, to display the stars of heaven. 
The electrician takes the twin of light, every whit as rapid, and 
happily absolved from its rule of running only in straight lines. 
He commits electricity to a wire, of as many zigzags as he pleases, 
and, paying little toll for a jaunt of two hundred miles, he bids 
it shine in our lamps, glow in our ovens, and in chemistry serve us 
either as a trowel or a sword. Electricity carries our burdens in- 
doors and out. It impels as readily the monster loom of a cotton- 
mill as the sewing-machine of a lady at home. More audacious 
still: the electrician throws pulses into free space, and forthwith 



160 CHOOSING BOOKS 

fruitful path, ignoring enticements to the right 
hand or the left. 

When we choose a theme of worth and interest, 
and gather the chapters of its story from day to day, 
from month to month, how may we read this story 
with most profit? It is old and wise counsel that 
bids us read pencil in hand. When we meet with a 
term we do not understand, "habeas corpus, " for 
instance, let us ascertain its meaning. How many 
of us know where the cave of Adullam was, or how 
the stars and stripes came into our national flag? 
To answer such queries we should have at hand a 
few sterling works of reference. First, an English 
dictionary, full enough to comprise foreign phrases 
in common use. Second, a gazetteer, with large, 
clear maps. Third, a classical dictionary. Next, 
the latest edition of Bartletfs Quotations, with 
concordances to the Bible and Shakespeare. 
Many a question sends us to a foreign dictionary, 
an encyclopedia, or to Who's Who in America. 

this globe becomes his whispering gallery. Other pulses, urged 
by another chord, pierce the flesh and blood of this man himself 
and portray his very bones. 

From long before the dawn of history the flame-kindler was the 
commander of human toil, and for ages every stride in civilization 
but confirmed his supremacy. Yet during the past sixty years 
that supremacy has ended for good and all, and we see that the 
flame-user but paved the way for bolder feats and deeper insights 
than were to him possible. Electricity to-day does all that fire 
ever did, does it better, and then accomplishes tasks infinitely 
beyond the scope of fire, however skillfully applied. 



CHOOSING BOOKS 161 

These should be faithfully consulted. In the 
course of years this habit of reference affords an 
amazing total of information, every item of it 
joined to a theme of vital interest. And interest, 
after all, is the main impulse and promise as we 
choose our books. 

Fiction. 

Blackmore, R. D. Lorna Doone. 

Bolderwood, Rolf. Robbery Under Arms. 

Bunyan, John. Pilgrim s Progress. 

Cable, George W. Doctor Sevier. 

Clemens, S. L. Prince and Pauper. Tom Sawyer. 
Huckleberry Finn. 

Cooper, J. F. Deerslayer. Last of the Mohicans. 
Pathfinder. Pioneers. 

Craik, Mrs. Dinah Maria. John Halifax, Gentle- 
man. 

Crawford, F. Marion. Mr. Isaacs. Tale of a 
Lonely Parish. A Roman Singer. 

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. 

Dana, Richard H. Two Years Before the Mast. 

Deming, Philander. Adirondack Stories. 

Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. 

Eggleston, Edward. Hoosier Schoolmaster. 

Eliot, George. Silas Marner. 

Goldsmith, Oliver. Vicar of Wakefield. 

Harris, Joel Chandler. Uncle Remus and His 
Friends. 



162 CHOOSING BOOKS 

Harte, Bret. Luck of Roaring Camp. 
Hope, Anthony. Prisoner of Zenda. 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. House of the Seven Gables. 
Holmes, 0. W. Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. 
Howells, W. D. Silas Lapham. Hazard of New 

Fortunes. 
Irving, Washington. Sketchbook. Bracebridge 

Hall. Wolf erf s Roost. 
Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. 

Melville, Herman. Typee. Omoo. Moby Dick. 
Poe, Edgar Allan. Tales. 

Russell, William Clark. Wreck of the Grosvenor. 
Scott, Michael. Tom Cringle s Log. 
Scott, Walter. Quentin Durward. Ivanhoe. 

Heart of Midlothian. 
Stevenson, R. L. Treasure Island. Kidnapped. 
Stockton, F. R. The Lady or the Tiger? and Other 

Tales. 
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. 
Thackeray, W. M. Esmond. 
Wallace, Lewis. Ben Hitr. 

Biography. 

Boswell, James. Samuel Johnson. 

Hay, John, and Nicolay, John G. Abraham 

Lincoln (in one volume). 
Franklin, Benjamin. Autobiography, edited by 

John Bigelow. 



CHOOSING BOOKS 163 

Lockhart, J. G. Walter Scott. 

Miller, Hugh. My Schools and Schoolmasters. 

Travel. 

Darwin, Charles. Journal of Researches on "The 

Beagle." 
Hudson, W. H. Idle Days in Patagonia. The 

Naturalist on the La Plata. 

Essays. 

Bacon, Sir Francis. 
Emerson, R. W. 
Lamb, Charles. 
Lowell, James Russell. 
Macaulay, Thomas B. 

History. 

The historical works of Francis Parkman are to be 
read in this order: Pioneers of France in the 
New World, Jesuits in North America, La Salle 
and the History of the Great West, The Old 
Regime in Canada, Frontenac, A Half Century 
of Conflict, Montcalm and Wolfe, The Con- 
spiracy of Pontiac. 



Jottings from a Note-Book 



165 



JOTTINGS 

FROM A NOTE- BOOK 

Hope is faith holding out its hands in the dark. 

* * * 

Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom. 

* * * 

Degree is much: the whole Atlantic might be 
lukewarm and never boil us a potato. 



Form may be of more account than substance. 
A lens of ice will focus a solar beam to a blaze. 



Ten builders rear an arch, each in turn lifting 
it higher; but it is the tenth man, who drops in the 
keystone, who hears our huzzas. 



Imagination is a window. If too wide, it means 
a weakened wall, and light in hurtful excess. 

167 



1 68 JOTTINGS FROM A NOTE-BOOK 

Mere precedence is much. No man will ever 
have as many descendants as Adam. The eyes 
of Columbus pointed to every mountain and 
stream ever mapped in America. 

* * * 

An art is a handicraft in flower. 

* * * 

Sound travels farthest as music; the most 
telling form of truth is poetry. 

* * * 

If a leader strides forward too fast, he may 
be hidden from his followers by the curvature 
of the earth. 

* * * 

A superstition is a premature explanation that 
overstays its time. 

* * * 

Ignorance may find a truth on its doorstep 
that erudition vainly seeks in the stars. 

* * * 

When a learner, in the fullness of his powers, 
comes to great truths unstaled by premature fa- 
miliarity, he rejoices in the lateness of his lessons. 



JOTTINGS FROM A NOTE-BOOK 169 

Discovery begins by finding the discoverer. 



* * * 



Is any knowledge worthless? Try to think of 
an example. 



* * * 



No gun is perfectly true. So the marksman, 
that he may hit the bull's-eye, points elsewhere. 



* * * 



The shore has perils unknown to the deep. 



* * * 



Let truth be a banner big enough to hide the 
man who holds it up 



* * * 



Tasks, like horses, go easiest two or three 
abreast. 

* * * 

The best place to stop a descent is as near the 
hill-top as may be. 

* * * 

Whoever ceases to be a student has never been 
a student. 



170 JOTTINGS FROM A NOTE-BOOK 

Nature is full of by-ends. A moth feeds on 
a petal, in a moment the pollen caught on its 
breast will be wedding this blossom to another 
in the next county. 

* * * 

When we try to imagine a chaos we fail. Let 
it be as formless as we please, our creation will 
stand on its base, its left will balance its right, 
it will float like a ship, drift as a cloud or swirl as 
desert sands. In its very fiber the mind is an 
order and refuses to build a chaos. 



Dumbness and silence are two different things. 



Because he has much the miser wants more. 



If there were no cowards there would be no 
bullies. 

* * * 

Decision differs from willfulness as atmospheric 
pressure from the fitful wind. 

* * * 

Nobody ever did people any good by standing 
aloof. If the pencils of an electric lamp are to 



JOTTINGS FROM A NOTE-BOOK 171 

shine they must first touch and then keep close 

together. 

* * * 

Jewelers work more gainfully in gold than in 
brass. Philanthropists please take notice. 



Many faulty servants do good work; few wagon 
wheels are perfectly round. 



The Kingdom of Heaven comes all the later 
for being expected too soon. 



At first the squirrel spins his cage; then the 
cage spins him. Men of business may take 

warning. 

* * * 

Nothing cools so fast as undue enthusiasm. 
Water that has boiled freezes sooner than any 

other. 

* * * 

When a man of evil stock tries to do right 
he is fighting all his forebears at once. 



The highest justice includes the wisest mercy. 



172 JOTTINGS FROM A NOTE-BOOK 

A tree nowhere offers a straight line or a regular 
curve, but who doubts that root, trunk, boughs, 
and leaves embody geometry ? 

* * * 

Memory is cultivated and praised, but who 
will teach us to forget ? A thousand remembrances 
of our folly and failure but lead us to expect more 

folly and failure. 

* * * 

When a thinker improves in expression, it is 
as if he thought better than before. 



To render aid to the worthless is sheer waste. 
Rain does not freshen the Dead Sea, but only 
enables it to dissolve more salt. 

* * * 

The effort of a lean, little spirit after indi- 
viduality is like a bubble trying not to be round. 

* * * 

Changes for the better are often resented. Old 
boots were once new — and hated. 

* * * 

Should a man's modesty be praised when there 
is nothing in him to justify pride? 



JOTTINGS FROM A NOTE-BOOK 173 

Small differences divide good from evil. A 
fruitful island, for ages affording a harbor safe 
and sheltered, slowly sinks; a few feet of sub- 
sidence and it becomes a murderous reef. 

* * * 

So strong is habit that when first a burden 
falls from our shoulders we feel discomfort in 

the loss. 

* * * 

As often as not it is the consciousness of a lack, 
not of a possession, that prompts us to preach or 

to brag. 

* * * 

There is no better training for uncommon 
opportunities than diligence in common affairs 



Limitation may be gainful. Cowper could 
tell a story better and more tersely in rhyme 
than in prose. The builder of engines for ships 
has long been teaching the builder of engines 
for mills how to save space, materials, and coals. 
In much the same fashion the automobile is point- 
ing the power-house to new economies. 



There is one best path to the mountain crest; 
yet there are other paths, nearly as good. Let 



174 JOTTINGS FROM A NOTE-BOOK 

Youth be assured that the steeps of success have 
as many paths as there are stout-hearted climbers. 



We despair of changing the habits of men, 
still we would alter institutions, the habits of 
millions of men. 



Happy the man who early in life seizes a worthy 

thought to which, in the routine of daily toil, he 

may add examples in point, qualifications indue 

measure, and at last discern law as it lights up a 

welter of detail. 

* * * 

A calculating engine is one of the most intricate 
forms of mechanism, a telegraph key one of the 
simplest. But compare their value. 



A greedy man sees what he gets by his greed, 

not what he misses. 

* * * 

Righteous indignation may be spleen in disguise. 

* * * 

Oh, the worth of coercion in a daily duty which 
must be done whether we like it or not ! The desire 
to be free from such compulsions is wrong. As 



JOTTINGS FROM A NOTE-BOOK 175 

well might the locomotive ask to dash out un- 
restrained over the prairie and the bridge. The 
tracks which confine it continue its usefulness and 

its life. 

* * * 

What do we want Freedom for? That we 
may have the best that life can give us, unshackled 
by tyrannies of custom, fashion, or prejudice. And 
how can we lead a right life unless we learn 
its laws and render them faithful obedience? 
Profoundly wise is the prayer which addresses 
God as He "whose service is perfect freedom." 



Men will never disappoint us if we observe 
two rules: (1) To find out what they are; (2) 
to expect them to be just that. 



There will be discontent just as long as it is 
easier to imagine than to fulfil imaginations, to 
dream than to work. 



There is no such reformer as an exacting duty. 
Note the asceticism of athletes and scouts. The 
ravages of drink are abated as machinery, with its 
demand for a clear brain and steady nerves, is 



176 JOTTINGS FROM A NOTE-BOOK 

multiplied on every hand. Every new stress of 
business and professional rivalry puts a fresh 
premium on sobriety and wise restraint. 



In old age a harsh and turbulent spirit may 
get credit for mellowing when it is only decaying. 

* * * 

A magician of old waved a wand that he might 
banish disease, a physician to-day peers through 
a microscope to detect the bacillus of that disease 
and plan its defeat. The belief in miracles was 
premature, that is all ; it was based on dreams now 
coming true. 

Educated folk keep to one another's company 
too much, leaving other people much like milk 
skimmed of its cream. 

* * * 

A man may be called generous who suffers 
from mere pecuniary incontinence. 

* * * 

One has no more business to go about with 
a naked mind than with an unclothed body. 



JOTTINGS FROM A NOTE-BOOK 177 

Truth is better disengaged from error than 

torn from it. 

* * * 

If a man has a marble quarry he asks: What 
can I do with marble? He builds, he seeks other 
builders. The possession of a power, like the 
possession of an estate, impels to use, to gain, to 

service. 

* * * 

To grow may mean to outgrow, to be charged 
with inconstancy as infertile ground is left for 
pastures new. 

* * * 

Money-making does not demand exalted talent, 
but it sets free talents which may be as dignified 
as you please. 

* * * 

Error held as truth has much the effect of 
truth. In politics and religion this fact upsets 
many confident predictions. 

* * * 

A small latch may open a big door. When a 
savage drilled one stick with another and kindled 
a spark, he gave mankind flame as a new and 
supreme resource. 



178 JOTTINGS FROM A NOTE-BOOK 

What was at first merely by-the-way may 
become the very heart of a matter. Flints were 
long flaked into knives, arrowheads, spears. Inci- 
dentally it was found that they struck fire; to-day 
that is their one use. 

* * * 

There may be a golden ignorance. If Pro- 
fessor Bell had known how difficult a task he 
was attempting, he would never have given us 
the telephone. 



We have outlived the fallacy as to the indefinite 
improvability of the mind, but there is still much 
lingering superstition as to possible betterments of 
character. It is as idle to say, "Be a Saint Paul, " 
as to say, "Be an Aristotle." 

* * * 

Adam Smith says that nobody ever imagined 
a god of weight — and he might have added, of 
the multiplication table either. It may be that 
the relations of Nature are all as inevitable as 
that twice two are four. 



Whatever a man has been he continues to be. 



JOTTINGS FROM A NOTE-BOOK 179 

Good may come from transplanting. When we 
go away from home we leave behind old enemies 
as well as old friends. It is well to be free from 
the sinister expectations of schoolmates, so as to 
amend old errors on a new stage with success. 
Then, too, a new home brings into play areas of 
the mind otherwise unfruitful because untilled. 



Obvious facts are apt to be over-rated. System- 
makers see the gravitation of history, and fail to 
observe its chemistry, of greater though less evi- 
dent power. 



Is not excellence in the ranks almost as rare 
as excellence in command ? 



Chemists show us that strange property, 
catalysis, which enables a substance while un- 
affected itself to incite to union elements around 
it. So a host, or hostess, who may know but little 
of those concerned, may, as a social switchboard, 
bring together the halves of pairs of scissors, men 
who become life-long friends, men and women who 
marry and are happy husbands and wives. 



180 JOTTINGS FROM A NOTE-BOOK 

Our brains are not only in our skulls; they are 
in our fingers when we draw, in our toes when we 

dance. 

* * * 

A man's own addition to what he learns is 
cement to bind an otherwise loose heap of stones 
into a structure of unity, strength, and use. 

* * * 

Love is the stronger for a dash of fear. 



We are apt to underestimate the force of un- 
organized conviction in politics and religion. 
Milk costs a city as much as water, for all that its 
supply is unfocussed, so little impressive in any 
way. The milk-can has nothing monumental 
about it, but the lofty aqueduct is not of more 
account . 

A mine is dug deeper than a cellar, and in more 
carefully chosen ground. 

* * * 

Teachers are limited by their pupils, orators 
by their hearers. The depth of water in New 
York docks tells the shipbuilder just how big a 
New York ship may be. 



JOTTINGS FROM A NOTE-BOOK 181 

The orchestration of truth demands many- 
diverse instruments, and a consummate wielder 

of the baton. 

* * * 

Honest men do not talk about their honesty: 
it is too deep to be in the consciousness. 



Much is thought and felt which must remain 

unspoken. Language is a mighty empire, but 

with bounds. 

* * * 

There is no denying the power which size exerts 
upon the imagination. Compare the effect on 
the mind of Swedenborgianism and Buddhism. 



An oblique and subtle flattery has come in 
with the reign of the people. We hear Environ- 
ment and Institutions blamed severely, and with 
justice ; but we hear not a word about what a man 
can do to make himself wiser, cleaner, better, 
more full of good-will. And yet if he wishes the 
nation reformed where can he begin better than 

at home? 

* * * 

Some young folks have wind-fall minds, pre- 
maturely detached from the tree of knowledge 
for a life-long sourness and pettiness. 



182 JOTTINGS FROM A NOTE-BOOK 

A great book is a mine as well as a mint : it 
suggests and excites as much thought as it pre- 
sents in finished form. 



Many an old library is not a quarry but a grave- 
yard. Its inscriptions tell us only of the dead. 



My son, honor thy father and thy mother by 
improving upon their example. 

* * * 

Mere segregation may be over-rated as to its 
fruits. Every sect or party on earth imagines 
itself stronger than it is. The Brethren of Bethel, 
who see so much of each other, fail to note how 
small Bethel is in comparison with America, and 
how few the Brethren are among the millions of 
men, women, and children who never heard of 
Bethel. 



A century ago astronomers, geologists, chemists, 
physicists, each had an island of his own, separate 
and distinct from that of every other student of 
Nature; the whole field of research was then an 
archipelago of unconnected units. To-day all the 



JOTTINGS FROM A NOTE-BOOK 183 

provinces of study have risen together to form a 
continent without either a ferry or a bridge. 

* * * 

Boundaries which mark off one field of science 
from another are purely artificial, are set up only 
for temporary convenience. Let chemists and 
physicists dig deep enough, and they reach com- 
mon ground. Delve from the surface of your 
sphere to its heart, and at once your radius joins 
every other. 



Evolution pays and that is why there is evolution. 
Cold copper may be beaten or carved to form a 
kettle and its lid. It is easier to melt the copper 
and pour it into molds. To-day a statue of bronze 
may take shape in a cool electric bath, coming out 
smooth, beautiful, and true. In each of these 
forward steps, as in the whole march of evolution, 
there is a constant gain in results, a rewarding 
avoidance of loss and waste. 



A part may be more than the whole. In Janu- 
ary a garden, clad in snow, gives back all the sun- 
shine it receives. In June, because it levies toll 
of every beam, in that very deed of subtraction its 



1 84 JOTTINGS FROM A NOTE-BOOK 

blossoms glow with tints and hues of utmost 

beauty. 

* * * 

Emergency is a subsoil plow bringing to light 
depths of mind and character before unknown and 
unsuspected. The great war in Europe has proved 
that the youth of America, born and nurtured in 
peace, make the best soldiers and sailors in the 
world. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: June 2009 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




